People laughed during the preview screening of Get Hard. This is what bothered me most about the comedy featuring Will Ferrell as a clueless finance executive who hires a much more clueful Kevin Hart to prepare him for 10 years in prison. More than how terribly made it is, how pathetic and offensive its humor is, how simply dumb it is, what irks me most about Get Hard is that people liked it. And more than whether or not the people in Hollywood are gay, straight, black, white, conservative or progressive, Get Hard’s tickets sales are what will ensure that Hollywood continues to make movies like Get Hard, movies that, yes, are inept, but are also, and more importantly, bad for our culture.

Ferrell plays James King, an extremely successful investment banker engaged to the hot, but spoiled daughter (Alison Brie) of the boss he idolized (Craig T. Nelson). At their engagement party, James is arrested for embezzlement and fraud, and because of either idiocy or astonishing entitlement, he thinks his innocence will keep him from prison. So, he refuses a plea deal, and gets a decade in San Quentin. After getting dumped and realizing he can’t escape his fate, he hires the manager of the little car wash company set up in his firm’s parking garage to teach him how to survive prison. Darnell (Kevin Hart) has never been to prison; in fact, he’s never even had a parking ticket. But because Darnell is black, James just assumes he’s been to prison. And Darnell needs the $30,000 James is offering because he wants to move out of Crenshaw to a safer neighborhood with better schools for his daughter.

Hilarity, in theory, should ensue. To be truthful, I laughed several times. Some of the racial humor involving James’s naiveté about black culture is funny, if clichéd and obvious. Kevin Hart’s responses to James, if silly, earned my chuckles. And some of their throw-away lines, most likely improvisation, were great, things like the string of absurdly original, often physically impossible, threats James makes while trying to learn to be threatening.

But even those were a continuation of one of the two jokes that the entire film rests on: There’s nothing more terrifying than gay sex except for forced gay sex. Having a sexual relationship with another inmate is seen as horrifying, as truly cruel punishment, and these jokes are bluntly, ridiculously homophobic. The joke is not about how silly James’s fear of gay sex is but rather how disgusting, bizarre and wrong gay sex is. A scene where Darnell takes James to a gay brunch spot and makes him pick up a guy and learn how to give a blowjob – yes, this is something that actually happens – was met with howls of laughter by the audience with whom I saw the film. James of course doesn’t go through with it, but he gets close enough, while making a face of such discomfiting horror, to make everyone watching uncomfortable. Some people find that discomfort hilarious. I was appalled, dumbstruck. Another gay critic who I was sitting with had been silent for the film up until then, when he said to me, “What the fuck am I watching?” What the fuck indeed.

The jokes about anal rape are constant. These jokes are the red meat of bro humor. According to our filmed popular culture, which may or may not reflect our actual culture, the worst fate for a heterosexual American man is the emasculation and humiliation of being raped by a man, so threatening someone with that fate, joking about that fate, basing an entire film plot on the fear of that fate is normal. Or as Will Ferrell told HitFix, “The premise of the movie is addressing the fears that someone may have going into prison. We didn’t come up with those fears. They’re just a societal norm.”

It’s a complex problem, though, because rape is horrible. And prison rape is horrible. But it’s not the violence or the violation that is what is joked about, it is the loss of masculinity, it is becoming the bitch to a man more powerful and more manly than you. This anxiety is at the heart of the gay panic defense for violent reactions to same sex flirtation. Making an entire film that encourages this norm, this fear, the basis for so much homophobia, is bad for our culture, and Ferrell, a supposed progressive, is either as clueless as James or being disingenuous.

Hart, in response to the same criticism, explained, “I said to myself, ‘funny is funny.’ And at the end of the day, funny is funny regardless of what area it’s coming from.” That’s just not true. Funny is not physics. It’s not a universal truth, like force equals mass times acceleration. It’s culturally, historically, situationally specific, and sometimes what you think is funny is hurtful to someone else and your laughter makes that hurt worse. Your laughter at that joke about anal rape makes homophobia worse, makes actual rape more stigmatized and makes prison worse. And people laughed at Get Hard. A lot of them.

The second in the Divergent series, a sub-Hunger Games dystopian trilogy about a young woman who is the key to her oppressed society’s freedom, Insurgent is disappointingly worse than its predecessor. Considering the cast – the remarkable Shailene Woodley as our heroine Tris, studly Theo James as her boyfriend Four, Kate Winslet as their fascist nemesis, Naomi Watts as Four’s mother, Ansel Elgort as Tris’ sister, Miles Teller as their possible ally or possible villain – it’s hard not to hope for something powerful, smart or at least well-acted. The politics of the film’s culture, in which everyone is placed in factions that fit their abilities perfectly, are schematic and obvious. The action scenes are finely exciting, the virtual reality action scenes are better, but the plotting is plodding and no one is interesting enough to care about. In the first film, Tris and Four’s courtship gave off some heat, but without that tension, the focus is on Tris’ internal life, which is mostly represented by fever dreams and CGI.

Sometimes, you have to do it straight. I don’t mean that you need to be heterosexual – perish the thought – but rather that you sometimes need to resist the temptation to change a classic. You don’t have to set Hamlet in 21st century Manhattan, sing “Billie Jean” as a guitar ballad, turn Hansel and Gretel into paramilitary witch hunters or make Sleeping Beauty a story about a broken-hearted fairy and not a wronged princess. The new interpretation can be fun, fascinating, even fantastic, but in our embrace of this postmodern twist on an old reliable we can sometimes forget why the old was reliable.

Cinderella, one of the most indelible of Western fairy tales, has been reinterpreted countless times since it first appeared in print in the 17th century; but mostly the story stays true to its origins: a wealthy girl is turned into a servant by a horrible stepmother and a fairy godmother helps the girl win the heart and hand of a charming prince. The animated Disney version released in 1950 is the most famous, and its story structure, characters and lyrics from its songs are so iconic that most people cannot think of Cinderella without thinking of Gus the mouse, the wicked stepsisters Drisella and Anastasia, and “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” While Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was wildly reimagined into the commercially successful but artistically and thematically messy Maleficent, with Disney’s massively budgeted live action version of Cinderella, they didn’t stray more than a few inches from the source material. And the result is an instant classic.

The plot should be familiar to most of us. In a small nameless kingdom, Ella (Lily James, with Eloise Webb as a young girl) is the beautiful and happy only daughter of a kind and wealthy trader (Ben Chaplin) and his perfect wife (Hayley Atwell). Their utopian family is ruptured when Ella’s mother dies; before she does, she tells Ella that she must always have courage and be kind. With this mantra and motto in her head and tittering mice as her only friends, she tries to make the best of her snide stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and ridiculously vapid stepsisters (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger), even after her father dies and these interlopers set out to ruin Ella’s life.

Meanwhile, the kingdom’s prince (Richard Madden) is being pressured to find a bride as his father (Derek Jacobi) is dying. The rest of the story is probably embedded in your brain whether you like it or not.

The basics of the film are lifted from the 65-year-old animated version, but Chris Weitz’s screenplay modernizes some of the more retrograde politics. There are multiple non-white characters, though not among the leads. Cinderella is a bold girl who speaks her mind, rather than a pretty victim of circumstance; James, best known as the similarly feisty Lady Rose in Downton Abbey, is perfectly cast. And the wicked stepmother is given real psychological motivation for her behavior. She is a woman ruined by her need for men to take care of her. This gives Blanchett ample space to be both hilariously bitchy and justifiably desperate, even sympathetic.

Various jokes, noticeable probably only to adults in the audience, show a certain level of irony to the proceedings, but most of the script is decidedly earnest. This suits director Kenneth Branagh’s talents. He is contemporary film’s great director of Shakespeare, and his reverence to and skill with classicism gives the story’s great moments – the majesty of the ball, the beauty of the slipper, the enchantment of the fairy godmother’s spells and the epic nature of the prince and Ella’s love – emotional heft that I couldn’t imagine could come from such an old story.

When Neill Blomkamp arrived with District 9 in 2009, he was heralded as the next great science fiction filmmaker. The film about apartheid policies against deceptively scary looking aliens in a slightly futuristic South Africa was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, most deservedly. Because of how good District 9 was, his not great, but certainly not awful follow-up Elysium was trashed by disappointed critics, who were even nastier last week with Chappie, his third film in his trilogy of speculative fables about oppression and technology. And I can’t fathom the hatred of the film, which I thoroughly enjoyed and found politically pointed.

Like District 9, Chappie takes place in a near-future South Africa ravaged by poverty and crime. There are no stranded aliens in Chappie, however, but rather incredibly effective robot police. These were built by a company called Tetravaal, run by Michelle Bradley, who is played by an under-utilized Sigourney Weaver, and designed by whiz kid Deon Wilson, played by Dev Patel, the star of Slumdog Millionaire. Not content with his success, he wants to take the robots further and give them artificial intelligence that includes free will, artistic judgement and complex emotions. Michelle tells him not to bother, so he works in secret, which involves borrowing a key chip that is never to leave the company’s headquarters. Deon’s rival engineer Vincent Moore’s larger, absurdly powerful designs are not going anywhere, and Vincent, played by a mulleted Hugh Jackman, is determined to take down Deon and his robots, no matter the cost.

Meanwhile, a trio of criminals, played by Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser of the South African bizarre art-pop band Die Antwood and Jose Pablo Cantillo, are in trouble with a psychotic gang leader. They need a lot of money and fast, and Yolandi figures the best way to score a major heist is to kidnap Deon and figure out how to turn off the robot cops. However, when they abduct Deon, he has just figured out how to create the artificial intelligence; while with the trio, he turns on Chappie, a modified version of his robot that can learn and develop like a child, only several thousand times faster. Deon is kicked out of the trio’s hideout, and Chappie is raised into a teenager – in two days. He talks in South African slang, tries to stay true to the moral compass Deon tried to instill in him, and fiercely loves Yolandi, who is a doting, if slightly bonkers, mother.

But then Vincent’s insane ambition gets in the way, and all hell breaks loose.

While there’s a hefty amount of action, particularly in the violent third act, the charm of the movie is in Chappie’s development as a person and his relationships with Yolandi, Ninja, and Deon. Voiced by Sharlto Copley, who is in all of Blomkamp’s films, Chappie is a delightful character, part ET, part Number Five, part South Park kid. Yolandi and Ninja, who seem to grate on some audience members and critics, are wildly weird as criminals, but they make the film much more interesting and original than any other recent robots-are-scary blockbusters in recent years, from I, Robot to the Terminator also-rans. Patel is convincing, though not nearly as interesting at Jackman’s Vincent, who is amusingly evil. It’s fun to see Hugh Jackman play against type.

I think Chappie works not only because of Blomkamp’s fine direction and witty writing, but also because he makes science fiction with clear social commentary. The militarization of the police, legal hyper violence as a means of social control, and a lack of human emotion in governance are all criticized. Whatever the film’s limitations, whether it’s too cute or too moralistic, Blomkamp’s politics are needed.

I heard someone on the radio refer to Focus as “that Will Smith movie the studio is dumping in February.” I was surprised partly because Will Smith movies, even atrocious ones, don’t ever get dumped during the late summer or early winter dump zones, and partly because Focus is written and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who don’t make bad movies. Focus, while frothy and flawed, fits nicely into Requa and Ficarra’s oeuvre of very funny, handsomely made, wonderfully acted romantic comedies.

Will Smith plays Nicky, an extremely successful and absurdly smooth conman who meets a blonde seductress named Jess when she tries to con him and fails miserably. Jess, played by Margot Robbie, asks Nicky to teach her to be a better con artist, and while he is resistant of developing any sort of relationship, he is clearly drawn to her. He gives her some pointers and then vanishes. She finds him in New Orleans, where he is prepping a group of pickpockets and con artists to victimize tourists in town for a big football game that seems a lot like the Super Bowl. He allows her to join the crew and she shows herself to be a rather stellar addition.

Their incessant flirting finally leads to sex and a bit of romance. After the con artists celebrate their massive haul of cash and goods, Nicky takes Jess to watch the big game in a luxury box, where they end up in a terribly destructive betting war with Liyuan, a Chinese gambler played by BD Wong. I won’t spoil what happens, but suffice it to say, it’s a series of surprises because with Nicky, everything is a con. Jess is left devastated and is unhappy to see Nicky three years later in Buenos Aires, where they are working different cons with Rodrigo Santoro and Gerald McRaney. They con each other, engage in longing looks and wacky banter, and fall in love.

There’s an incoherence to the plot because it relies on so many twists, which are based on so many lies. In some con movies, like the rather silly Now You See Me, the illusions are impossible and you simply suspend your disbelief and move on. Focus is meant to be or at least seem real; the actors are occasionally so natural that improvisation can be the only reason. So, when things get really weird, it’s a bit much to take. But the acting is so good and some of the writing so funny that the inconsistencies become glossed over. Mostly.

Will Smith is excellent as Nicky. Much more sedate as the cool criminal than he often is in action films and broad comedies, he oozes the kind of quiet charm that George Clooney did in Out of Sight; it’s possibly an imitation, and if so, it’s a good one. Margot Robbie, who narrowly missed an Oscar nomination as Jordan Belfort’s high-on-cash wife in Wolf of Wall Street, is a delight as the smart, skillful, often hilarious, often tough bombshell who almost brings down Nicky.

Several of the supporting actors steal their scenes. Adrian Martinez is the flamboyantly funny Farhad, one of Nicky’s close associates, and is full of filthy commentary. Gerald McRaney is a dangerous and grumpy old man who has great fun explaining his reasons for being appalled by young people. And BD Wong’s repartee with Nicky during their gambling dual is one of the film’s highlights. Liyuan’s smile is both endearing and sinister, and Wong energizes the film just when things seem to be getting dreary.

Emily Blunt and Meryl Streep overshadowed her in this Christmas’s Into the Woods, and Neil Patrick Harris and Jack Black did it to her in the opening number on the Academy Awards last week, but in the barely released but wonderful musical The Last Five Years, Anna Kendrick reminded me just how amazing she can be. Because of Pitch Perfect, in which she’s the lead but also the least interesting character, and because of the terrible Twilight movies, in which she plays Bella’s best friend, I had almost forgotten her brilliantly funny, vulnerable and Oscar-nominated performance as a driven but naïve management consultant in Up in the Air. As soon-to-be heartbroken Cathy in The Last Five Years, she finally again has a role that allows her to go that big and that deep, and she’s amazing.

That I liked the film is surprising to me. When I reviewed the stage version of The Last Five Years in 2002, I was decidedly unkind: “If Jason Robert Brown is ‘the future of musical theater,’ as the New York Times would have it, then we’re in for a frustrating few decades. After winning a Tony for Parade in 1999 and making a name with Songs for a New World a few years before, Brown has come back with The Last Five Years, a sung-through he-said, she-said chronicle of the break-up of a marriage. Jamie (Norbert Leo Butz) is a narcissistic novelist wunderkind and Cathy (Sherie Rene Scott) is a struggling actress who can’t handle her husband’s fame. Both Butz and Scott are near brilliant, and the songs are lovely, catchy, even moving. But the uncomfortable subtext to the story is the break-up of Brown’s real-life marriage to a struggling actress, and it’s made worse by Brown’s blatant side-taking in the show: it’s all Cathy’s fault.”

While I knew that the music would still be beautiful, I was scared that the film would again blame Cathy for everything, which is perfectly fine for pure fiction, but not for thinly-veiled autobiography. Brown’s ex-wife Theresa O’Neil had to sue to make Brown rewrite Cathy into someone less like her. To my great pleasure, Richard LaGravanese’s beautifully directed adaptation makes Jamie the bad guy. However much of Cathy’s lack of self-confidence is a problem, Jamie saying/singing, “I will not fail so you can be comfortable, Cathy / I will not lose because you can’t win” is extremely unkind. So is sleeping with his fans, skipping her shows for book parties, and being so, so arrogant.

Kendrick’s performance as Cathy is marvelous, enough even to surpass Sherie Rene Scott’s famous performance in the original Off-Broadway production. Kendrick’s ability to broadcast gleeful happiness in one scene, dejection and hurt in another, agonizing love in a third, all the while singing with her warm-toned, clear-as-a-bell voice is revelatory. As her heart broke, mine did, too.

Jeremy Jordan, however, is no Norbert Leo Butz, whose versatility and charisma were striking. Jordan, who was made the lead in the second season of Smash, is extremely handsome and has a great voice, but he seems to exude conceit even when he’s trying to seem humble; it’s his resting bitch-face. I can see why Cathy fell in love with him, but I can also see how the love was doomed from the start.

I was profoundly wrong about Brown’s future success. He went one to win another Tony and is considered one of the great living Broadway composers. That he allowed LaGravanese to retool The Last Five Years showed that he has conscience and humility, making him actually as different from Jamie as Cathy is supposedly from Theresa.

By now, I cannot imagine how anyone with an Internet connection or who has access to a television or knows any women who own books could not know about Fifty Shades of Grey, the poorly written soft-core S&M novel by E.L. James that, along with its two sequels, has sold 100 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. By the time you read this, the film version which opened Valentine’s Day weekend will have earned $300 million worldwide. It was released to enormous hoopla, with people titillated partly because of the naughty sex and partly because the film’s press tour has been so bizarre, with the stars clearly communicating their dislike for each other and the material and the director barely containing her disdain for James and the studio bosses.

Before I do that: Spoiler alert! I’m going to reveal a good deal of the plot. Consider yourself warned.

The movie starts out with a preposterous situation, which I guess should have been a sign of what was to come. Anastasia Steele – a name only a Saturday Night Live writer or a wannabe romance novelist could invent – is a college senior who goes to interview Christian Grey, an insanely successful, absurdly hot, and very young Seattle media tycoon who has been chosen as her commencement speaker. Ana’s roommate Kate, a journalism major, was supposed to do the interview but got sick, so instead of sending another reporter, she sent her clueless roommate as a replacement.

The interview is, of course, awkward, and only partially because Ana doesn’t know what she’s doing; Christian is intense, difficult and evasive, and Ana is flustered, fascinated and surprisingly aggressive in questions her roommate didn’t want her to ask. Obviously, they’re attracted to each other, but because Ana is not weird or crazy, she lets it all go.

Christian, on the other hand, stalks her. Sometimes, it’s cute, like when he appears out of nowhere to save her from possible, but unlikely, date rape when she’s drunk. Other times, when he’s clearly broken into her apartment, it’s extremely creepy. Their courtship consists of one grand gesture after another, some romantic and others unnerving, and at no point is Christian depicted as attractive because of anything other than his physicality and his money. Ana is wonderful – sexy, plucky, empathic, smart – and what she sees in this creep is never – ever – understandable.

This is especially the case when his aversion to emotional intimacy is combined by his need to have all sex be based in a sadomasochistic power relationship in which the woman, in this case Ana, is submissive to his dominance. I can understand why someone might want to experiment with his particular proclivity, but I cannot believe a virgin would, nor can I understand, based on her thin characterization, what she might find exciting in it other than being the center of Christian’s attention.

When he offers her a contract that spells out how such a dom/sub relationship would work, she understandably balks. Even after an intense negotiation scene, the best five minutes of the film, she never signs. But Christian is obsessed, she’s in love, and sometimes the sex is rough and fun, and then at the end he shows his true self: A violent, disturbed sadist. Thank God she dumps him at this point, but only after he has nearly succeeded at shaping, changing and controlling her, and only after she’d fallen in love.

There are so many things wrong with the film. Why did Universal release such a disturbing “love” story on Valentine’s Day? Why is BDSM depicted as the fetish of the psychologically damaged and mentally unstable? (It’s not.) Why were the women in the preview audience enamored with the film and with Christian, believing as Ana did, that this narcissistic loon could be saved? That they thought this even with Jamie Dornan’s wooden and vapid performance is testament to the culture and the state of gender relations, not to the film.

My biggest fear before I saw Jupiter Ascending was that the Wachowskis would take themselves too seriously, yet again, and try to drench the audience with wishy-washy New Age philosophy, a la “everything is a facsimile!” in The Matrix Trilogy and “we’re all connected!” in Cloud Atlas. But they restrained themselves, thematically anyway, and instead produced a ridiculous, often ridiculously fun, space opera that is a wonderful antidote to the over-serious Oscar films dominating movie-going. It’s hard to claim that Jupiter Ascending is “good” but it’s certainly entertaining. It’s the most fun I’ve had in the theater in several months. (But it’s still not “good.”)

Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, the daughter of a Russian immigrant (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and an astronomer (James D’Arcy) who was killed before his daughter was born. Jupiter cleans houses with her mother and aunts and dreams of making enough money to buy a telescope. But Jupiter is the genetic reincarnation of one of the richest people in the universe, a queen thousands of years old who owned multitudes of planets. After the queen’s death, her children Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus (Douglas Booth), and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) have squabbled over her fortune (and the sinister way they make it), and when they discover that she has reappeared as a clueless Earthling, they all send bounty hunters to get her – or kill her. One of those is Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a part-wolf, part-human super-soldier with a problematic past. He reaches Jupiter first, just as all hell is breaking loose, and he convinces his former commander Stinger (Sean Bean) to help him protect Jupiter.

The rest of the film is a series of chase sequences, super-heroic battles, double-crosses, myth-heavy back story monologues and jaw-dropping, occasionally hilarious, art direction. In other words, it’s a Wachowski movie, and for a change, this is a good thing. The action sequences are not quite on the revelatory level of The Matrix, but when Balem’s minions pursue Jupiter and Caine through the skies above Chicago, it was so thrilling that the review audience I was part of cheered. This is the same audience that laughed at some of the worst lines and even worse acting, much of which involved an epically silly Eddie Redmayne, doing some sort of Darth Vader meets the Green Goblin thing that makes his soon-to-be Oscar a bit questionable.

Some of the dialogue – especially that of Balem, Titus, and Kalique – is pretty preposterous and reminiscent of some of the worst parts of David Lynch’s much too earnest Dune, and it ends up being funnier than the deliberately comedic flirting between Jupiter and Caine. A similar thing happens with the costumes, which seem to have been inspired by Flash Gordon or Fifth Element, pointy and ornate 1990s and 1990s avant garde. But just as in those films, this becomes part of the appeal: pulpy, B-movie science fiction that has no other goal than to entertain.

And how much was I entertained! I cheered, laughed, gawked, had my heart race and then I wished that it would make enough money for a sequel. As goofy as Redmayne is, Tatum and Kunis are delights, taking a cue from their directors and taking neither themselves nor the film seriously. But they still serve up action and romance, grounding the film in a humanity needed as a counterpoint to so many computer-generated effects.

It’s likely that both the Best Actor and Best Actress winners at this year’s Academy Awards will go to portrayals of people suffering from chronic neurodegenerative diseases. The films couldn’t be more different, however. In The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne plays Stephen Hawking, who was struck with Lou Gehrig’s disease (or ALS) more than 50 years ago and is miraculously still alive, if a paraplegic who speaks through a computer. The film is a saccharine triumph-over-adversity tale that ends with adoring fans cheering him on. In Still Alice, Julianne Moore plays a fictional woman who develops early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The story is not about triumph, but about the slow degradation of Alice’s once lively brain and perfect life and, secondarily, how that affects her loving family. It’s as subtle and sad as The Theory of Everything is obvious and uplifting. In fact, Still Alice may be the saddest movie I’ve ever seen.

Alice Howland is a renowned professor of linguistics at Columbia University, married to a handsome and successful scientist named John (Alec Baldwin), and mother to three children, slightly petulant Ann (Kate Bosworth), bright and handsome Tom (Hunter Parrish), and struggling actress Lydia (Kristen Stewart). When she starts forgetting things, like her lectures or her keys or how to get home during a run or, worse for a linguistics scholar, her words, she goes to a neurologist, who seems at first not concerned, and then as the forgetting worsens, quite concerned. She keeps the problems hidden from John for a while until her doctor convinces Alice that, yes, this is early onset Alzheimer’s, and her cognitive functioning will only get worse.

They then tell the children and, to make matters worse, tell them that this kind of Alzheimer’s is genetic, so they might get it too. As Alice’s condition worsens, the forgetting becomes constant, and the humiliations almost totalizing, you’ll probably be unable to stop from crying.

There are some moments of brightness. The shifting of Alice and Lydia’s relationship, from Alice sternly mothering her daughter to Lydia becoming a sweet mother-like figure to Alice as she declines, is the only truly inspiring subplot. A scene featuring a struggling Alice giving a speech and then cheered on by a moved audience is also cheerful, but it’s also too clichéd – it’s basically the exact same scene as the climax of The Theory of Everything. Aside from these, the film is wrenchingly sad, with every moment barreling toward a foregone conclusion. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s.

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the gay couple who also wrote and directed Quinceañera and The Fluffer, do a great job with the source material, a pedantic novel by a neuroscientist, but I wish they’d done more to make it more than a dramatic clinical case study. It’s a snuff film; it’s a stunningly well-acted, sensitively written, finely directed, full-of-prestige snuff film. Aside from Julianne Moore’s performance, which is truly a great depiction of struggle and sadness, seeing the film seems unnecessary for anyone who goes to films to be entertained or enlightened. To be fair, if you don’t have any experience with Alzheimer’s, you will learn something.

If you feel the need to see Moore give an Oscar-worthy performance before the awards broadcast, I suggest going back to Boogie Nights, The Hours, Far from Heaven, A Single Man, or, in a few weeks, Maps to the Stars, in which she’s even better than she is in Still Alice.

In its first weekend in wide release, American Sniper earned more money than all of the other eight nominees for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards. It made $107 million through the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, a record for a movie in January. By the time the Oscars are given out, it’s likely that the film will earn more than all of the other eight combined. The film had great marketing and was receiving award nominations, but nothing could have predicted how much the film would draw in audiences, not only in so-called middle America, but on the coasts, too; it was the number one film in California that weekend, too.

Something about American Sniper has struck a chord, and it’s not clear what. Pundits are arguing about its politics, whether it’s pro or anti-war, whether it’s racist or just murderous, whether it’s true or not, whether or not it deserved to receive six Oscar nominations. I think the politics are decidedly muddled, and I think it deserved one nomination – for Bradley Cooper’s excellent performance – but the rest are somewhat ridiculous. It’s not a great film.

Cooper plays Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in American military history. He killed around 160 people during his five tours in Iraq: He killed insurgents, terrorists, men, women and children. He killed them because, he says and we’re told, they were trying to kill American troops. They are savages, he says over and over; murderous savages he had to stop. Yes, it was his job, and he was damn good at it. He became famous and he became a hero in the military, and after he wrote a book called American Sniper, he became famous and heroic for a lot of other people.

But what’s interesting about Kyle, a charming and laconic Texan who blindly believes America is the greatest country on Earth, is not that he was a killing machine. It is what he was haunted by. He failed to save too many soldiers, too many of his friends. He clearly didn’t relish killing little boys holding bombs meant for American soldiers, but it’s thinking about the soldiers who lost limbs, eyes and their lives that he can’t shake. American Sniper is less a war film than it is an examination of post-traumatic stress disorder that uses violent, vicious action scenes to explain the suffering that comes afterwards.

America’s great formalist director Clint Eastwood handles the action and the domestic drama with equal skill. The battle scenes – which are mostly a series of people dying, ducking and firing bullets – are brisk and effective, though they are sometimes confusing, and rarely are they interesting, except when Kyle seems to be battling his morals before killing a woman or a child. (He doesn’t blink when he shoots an adult male.) The scenes back home, with Kyle’s wife Taya (Sienna Miller), allow Cooper to portray PTSD with great sensitivity and allow Miller to complain about her husband’s patriotic duty that seems strangely like a death wish. The Kyles’ home life is endearing, even idyllic, and it works as a powerful contrast to the hell of Chris’ tours in Iraq.

The reason any of this works is Cooper, who has received his third acting Oscar nomination in three years for playing Chris Kyle. (Cooper is also nominated as a producer for American Sniper.) This is by far Cooper’s greatest performance, and the first one that tamps down his naturally brilliant comedy. Cooper exudes a kind of Texan cowboy masculinity that we know better as myth but which still pops up in real people, and Chris Kyle was one of those people. Kyle is tortured by what he experienced in Iraq, and that torture is portrayed with agonizing fear and anxiety easily seen in Cooper’s expressive eyes and jerky head.

After a few pushes from other veterans and a vet psychologist, he starts spending time with wounded and traumatized vets, helping them overcome their demons by taking them to the shooting range. (It was a laudable goal if not a great idea, and it ended in tragedy.) How this helps Kyle regain his composure, overcome his PTSD, become a better dad and husband and redeem himself is completely left out of the film.

We learn more about how to sight a rifle than we learn about how Kyle overcame killing 160 people. That the latter is impossible is left out of the film. That is not something that deserves awards.

American Sniper

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Jason Hall and Chris Kyle (book)

Starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller and Luke Grimes

Rated R

At your local multiplex

Also playing

Paddington

Most of the Oscar bait films sitting in theaters right now are not cheerful, and some of them are just downright depressing. And you certainly shouldn’t take your kids to American Sniper or Foxcatcher. But Paddington is wondrous.

A big hit in Britain this Christmas, it was nominated for a British Oscar for best adapted screenplay, and I think it’s deserving. Freely adapted from the children’s book series by Michael Bond that began in 1958, Paddington is a rare intelligent talking bear from darkest Peru, and in Paul King’s film, he sets off for London to find a new home after the forest where he lived with his aunt and uncle is destroyed. When he gets to England, he stands in Paddington Station and hopes someone will take him in. The Brown family do, over the objections of father Henry (Hugh Bonneville) but with the great support of mother Mary (Sally Hawkins).

While Paddington tries to fit into the world he doesn’t understand – with typical slapstick results – an evil taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) is determined to stuff the poor bear and display him in a museum.

This subplot is a little too similar to 101 Dalmatians, but the execution of the whole story is sweeter, smarter and much more charming. Hawkins is particularly wonderful as the wise and emotionally grounded mother, and Bonneville does a great curmudgeon. The kids, Madeleine Harris as Judy and Samuel Joslin as Jonathan, are both winning as well. And Ben Wishaw, the out gay actor best known as Q in the new James Bond films, does Paddington’s voice with perfect whimsy.

Even without the unintentional double entendres about (gay) bears, the film is worth seeing even if you don’t have children.

GALECA announces its awards

The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association (GALECA), of which I am a member, announced its annual awards, and while we followed the crowd in a few places, we queered it up in others. Boyhood was named best picture, Julianne Moore best actress for Still Alice, and Eddie Redmayne best actor for The Theory of Everything. But then we gave the famously snubbed director of Selma Ava DuVernay best director. Queer Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s brilliant Cannes’ hit Mommy won best foreign language film, while Pride won both best LGBT film and best unsung film of the year. TV awards went to Transparent, The Normal Heart, and Lisa Kudrow. And we gave our Timeless Award to George Takei, who has done so much as an activist, actor and humorist.

Selma, the film about Martin Luther King and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, is an extraordinary film: wrenching, inspiring and impeccably made. As a depiction of one of the most important events of the Civil Rights Movement, it is also more socially and politically relevant to our contemporary world than any feature film released this year. Its connection to the recent protests against racist police brutality is the reason that Selma is essential viewing and also the reason why so many people who normally wouldn’t give a second thought to historical accuracy in movies have wrapped themselves into the controversy about the film and its depiction of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1965, Martin Luther King had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Two years prior he had made the “I have a dream” speech at the Great March on Washington, which helped propel the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But blacks in the South still faced numerous barriers to voting, from being forced to pass absurd tests to requiring a current voter to vouch for them, particularly difficult if there were no black voters around. In 1965, King wanted Johnson to use his rather great political power to pass a comprehensive voters’ rights bill. But Johnson wanted to focus on his War on Poverty that year. This disagreement is inarguably fact, but the fictionalized depictions of King and Johnson’s actual arguments have riled a bunch of white people who can’t bear to imagine Johnson was a cynical politician. (Note: It is an inarguable fact that Johnson was a cynical politician. That’s one of the reasons he got so much done.)

The events in Selma, a town with a majority of black residents only 2 percent of whom could vote, helped force the Voting Rights Act into existence. Selma is about how that happened, how King’s presence in Selma brought the media, which in turn showed how the Alabama state troopers viciously beat peaceful black protesters who were trying to raise awareness about their disenfranchisement, which in turn brought more protesters and more support, from both Johnson and the American people, for a voting rights bill.

Selma has two main plots. One is focus on the political machinations of the march, both among King (David Oyelowo), Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) and intransigent Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and among the civil rights activists from King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had been organizing in Selma before King arrived. These are fascinating, both because of how they humanize and complicate iconic historical figures but also because they depict pragmatic, sometime even crass, strategizing around events that popular history have made to seem purely about the forces of good versus evil. For example, one of the reasons King and his associates wanted to march in Selma was because they knew that its sheriff would brutalize the protesters, thus garnering sympathy from the nation.

Selma’s other plot focuses on the emotional toll of the civil rights movement. Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), King’s wife, is frustrated by his constant absence, the danger they are in, and how close to the truth the rumors of his infidelity are. King himself wonders if he can ever succeed and whether he will survive. And in smaller, perfectly crafted subplots, the people of Selma struggle – in particular Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) and Jimmie Lee Johnson (Keith Stanfield) – for dignity and for their lives. And in the epic sequence focused on Bloody Sunday, the day when Alabama troopers savagely attacked the marchers, director Ava DuVernay brings to life one of the most horrific moments of the 1960s with such skill I was left in tears for the rest of the film and sometime after.

DuVernay’s work on Selma is tremendous, and it announces a major American filmmaker. Her recreations of well documented events are flawless, but so are her quieter, mostly fictionalized, scenes, such as those between King and Coretta or between Cooper and Selma’s voter registrar. The performances she pulled from her cast, in particular Ejogo, Winfrey, Stanfield and Oyelowo, are roundly wonderful. What the amazing Oyelowo does as King is to make a legendary and iconic hero into a man – a great, flawed, human man.

I’m not a fan of the phrasing “there are two kinds of people: the kind of people who like X and the kind of people who hate X.” It’s hackneyed, and not always true. Some people just don’t care about X. I guess the point is that X is something people have strong feelings about, and no one says “meh” about X. And X is usually something very specific, like improvisational jazz, sea urchin roe, or reality TV about rich housewives. Paul Thomas Anderson movies tend to fit in with these things. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t care about his films if they’ve seen them. They might loathe them and they might love them. No one shrugs off Magnolia or The Master. I’m in the camp of people that treats a new Anderson movie like a cosmic event; he’s my favorite living filmmaker. And his latest film, a drug-addled shaggy dog story based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, is already divisive. People hate it, people love it, and I’m one of the latter people. I wanted to move into the film and set up house.

The mystery is a tangled curlicue of nonsense, but because it’s based on a Pynchon novel, it’s not supposed to make much sense, or not in a typical noir fashion anyway. If you expect the film to work that way, with a linear narrative of clues and confrontations leading to the capturing of a bad guy, you’ll be pretty irritated by the end. The film is more about the chaos, corruption, narcissism, ironies and aesthetics of Los Angeles in the 1970s; it’s not really about whether Shasta Fay is involved in a kidnapping or if Bigfoot is an ass or a hero. That the plot is more or less irrelevant to the film is probably considered a major flaw in the minds of a lot of viewers (and reviewers), but I was enrapt by the impeccable art direction, the hazy and saturated cinematography, and bizarre singular scenes, from a coke-fueled visit to a mysterious dental office to a creepily loud meal at a Chinese diner with Bigfoot. Sometimes Anderson is channeling Altman, or Kubrick, or even Lynch, but even with those influences, Inherent Vice is an Anderson film, working wonderfully alongside Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

Phoenix, as usual, uses his idiosyncratic method acting to great effect. He’s like an incredibly stoned, less competent Columbo. He’s sexier in this than in most films he’s done, so it makes sense so many women want Doc, despite his klutzy cluelessness. Brolin leaves a much bigger impression as a cop who feels the need to portray a much tougher cop, something like Eliot Ness with the voice of a fog horn. He’s the funniest thing about a very funny movie, and it’s a shame when he’s not on screen. But the appearances of Chau’s witty Jade and Witherspoon’s Kimball, as well as cameos from Martin Short and Maya Rudolph, help propel the film through the strange streets of Los Angeles.

A bunch of wonderful films opened in San Diego in 2014. These are my favorites.

10. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, director)

Bong Joon-ho’s first English-language film is astonishing, breathtaking in its visuals, bleak in its plot and enraging in its refusal to do what most American audiences expect from their science fiction action films. The film is set in 2031, 17 years after an attempt to fix global warming goes horribly wrong, freezing the planet and killing all life. All life except for those who made it onto a long, high-tech train on a constant circumnavigation of the planet. The train was built by a visionary inventor named Wilford, who predicted the environmental calamity and manages the miraculous engine that keeps the train moving and its inhabitants alive. While the train features greenhouses, a fish farm, livestock, a school, restaurants, clubs, these luxuries are available only to the riders in the front of the train. In the back, the riders live in squalor, surviving on blocks of mysterious, rubbery protein and subject to the violent whims of Wilford’s brutal security forces who steal the riders’ children and freeze the limbs off riders brave enough to fight back. These tail riders are plotting a revolution at the beginning of the film, with Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell), Tanya (Octavia Spencer), and the tail riders’ de facto leader Gilliam (John Hurt) trying to find the best moment to push through to the other cars, past the security forces and their absurd, saccharine chief, Mason (Tilda Swinton). When they do, the film takes you on a shocking, weird and wonderful journey unlike anything offered in American films in years. Streaming and on DVD.

9. Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, director)

Reese Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir Wild is based on. Like the book, the film is partly autobiography and partly the story of her six month trek of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Oregon. This experience is powerfully cathartic to Cheryl; she has just extracted herself from a failed marriage, an addiction to heroin and some extravagantly self-destructive habits that seem to have been a failed coping mechanism to deal with the grief over losing her mother. While Cheryl walks and hikes and gets blisters and nearly starves and narrowly escapes rape and hypothermia, her earlier life is shown in flashbacks, many of which feature a luminous Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother. Director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose direction made Dallas Buyer’s Club vastly better than its screenplay, took Nick Hornby’s script and crafted a visual and emotional experience that goes far beyond the words, either Hornby’s or Strayed’s. Vallée dwells on the beauty of the landscapes without sentimentalizing, shows Cheryl’s bad habits without being prurient, and guides Witherspoon and Dern to flawless and naturalistic performances. In theaters.

8. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, director)

The power of lust is at the heart of this quiet, erotic, disturbing and very French film. Lithe and beautiful Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) comes to a lakeside beach every day to swim and cruise men. He is infatuated with Michel (Christophe Paou), a mustachioed man with a particularly skillful freestyle stroke and a clingy boyfriend. One evening, Franck watches Michel drowning his boyfriend before calmly swimming to the shore, dressing and driving away. Franck does nothing, and the next day, Michel starts flirting with Franck. Despite some apprehension, Franck returns the affection and they begin to have trysts every afternoon. Still, Franck clearly worries that Michel will do to him what he did to his previous lover. The strange and almost cynical morality of the characters and the ever increasing tension about Michel’s potential make what at first seems like a bland sex comedy into something much more complex, metaphorical and even epic. It’s hard to know exactly what writer-directed Alain Guiraudie is doing, whether it is an existentialist homage to Camus’s The Outsider or just the story of how far lust and connection can warp a man’s moral compass. The lack of clarity in the Guiraudie’s message makes the film’s sex more disconcerting, but also more powerful. Streaming and on DVD.

7. Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu, director)

Innovative, hilarious, and moving, Birdman is film about theater, film, and actors, as well as regret, love, family, and, in a way, the meaning of life, and it soars. Michael Keaton is blockbuster star Riggan Thomas, who wants to earn respect by appearing on Broadway, so he writes, directs, and stars in a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. His recovering addict daughter Sam (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and his costar is lauded, but unhinged, method-actor Mike Shiner (Ed Norton). The film veers from slapstick comedy to melodrama, but the depiction of Riggan’s interior life makes the film wholly original. He has conversations with and sometimes becomes Birdman, the superhero he once played, and whether or not Riggan is crazy or actually super powered is never really made clear. But his depression and frustration and desire for relevance, to the world, to his daughter, and to his ex-wife, are all real. This is by far Keaton’s greatest performance, a true tour de force of versatility, believability, and emotional honesty. Keaton has never had material like Birdman, and he’s never had a director like Alejandro González Iñárritu, who elicited an epic performance from Keaton and an equally brilliant performance from Norton, whose Mike is a caustic, hilarious, nutty Lothario of surprising depth. In theaters.

6. The Lego Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors)

The Lego Movie is the greatest advertisement for a toy ever made, but it’s also a great movie in and of itself and easily the best animated film of the year. Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker in a city that runs with clockwork precision: Everyone is perfectly regimented, efficient, and properly tasked. Everyone loves the same song “Everything is Awesome!” and the same TV show “Where’s My Pants?” and their leader President Business (Will Ferrell). But the president is actually a dictator with a massive army of evil robots and nasty cops (the leader of which is voiced by Liam Neeson) at his command, and he is planning to destroy the Lego universe using a weapon called the Kragle. Is Emmet their prophesized savior? Some rebels (voiced by Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, and others) think he may be, and hilarity and action ensue. Writers and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, in addition to mixing witty and sly adult-oriented jokes with kid-pleasing slapstick, work on multiple thematic levels, creating a morally and ethically complex film out of what could have been a cynical advertisement. The film sets up a battle between mindless, automated corporate capitalism on one side and creativity, freedom, and, in a way, mysticism on the other. It culminates in a surprising moving third act that left me in tears. And wanting Legos. Streaming and on DVD.

5. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, director)

Lewis Bloom, played by a balls-out brilliant Jake Gyllenhaal, is a nightcrawler, a freelance reporter who spends the nights wandering the city, waiting for a police scanner to announce a car crash or a murder that can be filmed and turned into the bloody local TV news. Lewis is pathologically ambitious, solicitous and aggressive, and he speaks almost entirely in the aphorisms of self-help books and online business classes, always with a broad smile and wide eyes, all the more creepy on his tightly gaunt body. He unnerves Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the news director of a low-rated Los Angeles morning show, but he also brings in great footage, which she craves. How he does it, and how he plays Nina is what makes Nightcrawler thrilling and more than a little bonkers. This is the first film directed by Dan Gilroy, who pulls out Gyllenhaal’s greatest performance and gives us the best thriller of the year. The two are inextricably connected, because it is Gyllenhaal’s unexpected actions and off-kilter affect that kept me on the edge of my seat and muttering “wow” over and over. Gilroy also handles the car chases and random violence on Los Angeles’s iconic streets with skill, evoking the L.A. noir of Drive and Heat. The film is disquieting and, even at its most fantastical, somewhat believable. Lewis may not exist, but the stories that he records for Nina’s broadcasts do. We’ve all seen them. In theaters.

4. Only Lovers LeftAlive (Jim Jarmusch, director)

A luminous, sublime, and brilliant Tilda Swinton plays Eve, an achingly-sweet, centuries-old aesthete who happens to be a vampire. Her similarly afflicted husband Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston, is a glum musical genius who hides from the world, composing from afar, talking to no one but a clueless hired hand (Anton Yelchin) and his wife, but to her only over Skype. She lives in Tangiers, along with her friend Kit Marlowe (yes, that one, played by John Hurt), and Adam lives in a particularly dilapidated section of Detroit. She decides to come to him after he expresses more suicidally depressive thoughts about the weight of the world. During her visit, as they discuss history and art and their love, Eve’s crass and silly sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives and creates situations that force this short story in the lives of Adam and Eve to climax in hunger and, of course, blood. Funny, haunting, weird and sad, Jarmusch’s movie is the rare one about the undead that is actually about the living. On DVD.

3. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, director)

Jonathan Glazer’s hypnotic masterpiece follows a woman (Scarlett Johansson) as she drives around Edinburgh, stalking men, seducing them and then enveloping them in a gooey blackness. After an encounter with a disfigured man, she seems to develop introspection. She wanders into the Scottish countryside, pursued by mysterious men on motorcycles and less mysterious men with dirty minds. We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is. The audience needs to do a lot of work to piece things together, and this is often the hallmark of what we call “art films.” This kind of abstraction can become pretentious, but in Under the Skin, the abstraction is what makes the art. Glazer’s sublime use of the foggy Scottish landscapes, Mica Levi’s truly haunting string-heavy score, Scarlett Johansson’s brave and subtle performance and our own expectations of science fiction combine to create one of the most original and indelible films of the year. Streaming and on DVD.

2. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, director)

In 2002, Richard Linklater cast a boy (Ellar Coltrane), his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke), and he filmed them as a growing, living, changing family over 12 years. Linklater deserves a slew of awards simply for overcoming such a film’s logistical difficulties – flighty children, lengthy contracts, the ravages of time and history – but he and his actors also managed to create a film as true to the emotional journey of childhood and modern American family life as any other movie in a generation. Like the life that Linklater is depicting, Boyhood does not have a plot as much as it has a series of vignettes focused around key moments in Mason’s childhood. The film feels like cinéma vérité, but the emotional power of the editing, the acting Linklater elicited from his actors both young and old (particularly Arquette, doing the best work of her career), and in the beauty of his landscapes and light is something we usually only see in finely crafted narrative films. Boyhood is not perfect – it’s long and rough in places and the plotting seems a bit forced at times – but it is nonetheless an extraordinary monument to the power of art, film and family. On DVD.

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, director)

In Wes Anderson’s greatest film so far, it is 1932 and the Grand Budapest Hotel is in its heyday. A treasure of the fictional Eastern European nation of Zubrowka, it is packed with suited dignitaries and their bejeweled wives, and the regimented staff is legion; over all of it presides the hotel’s slightly foppish and nearly over-competent concierge M. Gustave, played by a miraculous, David Niven-inspired Ralph Fiennes. Gustave is not only devoted to his hotel, but also to the numerous lonely older women who frequent it, and his favorite is Madame Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton), an 84-year-old countess who adores Gustave. When the countess dies, Gustave and his favorite bellboy Zero (Tony Revolori) go to the reading of the will. The countess’ dastardly son Dmitri (Adrian Brody) is livid that Gustave is given a priceless painting called Boy With Apple and demands that this never happen, but with Zero’s encouragement and help, Gustave steals the painting and returns to the hotel. The caper that ensues is thrilling and hilarious and full of idiosyncratic supporting figures played by the likes of Willem Defoe, Saoirse Ronan and Harvey Keitel. The actors are directed to such mannered behaviors as to be almost abstracted; they archly speak as if they have hopped out of a Roald Dahl or JD Salinger story, and they move like gorgeously drawn cartoon characters, sharply and exaggerated, influenced by slapstick and mime. The result is the opposite of natural or subtle, but Anderson’s direction, of actors and art and photography, communicates the themes and emotions – the sadness of nostalgia and growing up, the power of loyalty and courage – with something that achieves grace. On DVD.

Honorable mentions: Locke, Foxcatcher, Begin Again, The Homesman, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Way He Looks, Guardians of the Galaxy, Pride, The Imitation Game, and Whiplash.

2014 movies not opening in San Diego until 2015: Selma, Inherent Vice, Citizenfour, Cake, Ida, and Two Days, One Night.

This Christmas, you have a rather odd choice of movies to see after you’ve opened your presents and gorged on goose (if you’re into goose gorging). Oddly, most of them are about as Christmasy as the Easter Bunny. Unbroken is about a British soldier who endures years of torture as a prisoner of war. Big Eyes is about a woman whose husband saw her talent as a painter and told everyone it was his. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is about a soldier who killed more people – legally – than any other in American history. The Gambler is about a compulsive one. And The Imitation Game is about a World War II hero who was chemically castrated for being gay and then killed himself. Joy to the world! But wait, there’s another movie, one about fairy tales and love and children and defeating evil! Into the Woods. That sounds wholesome.

It’s not. I mean, it is. It only alludes to violence and sex. It ends happily. Sorta. It’s based on the most famous of fairy tales, so the morality is black and white. Actually, no. It’s all really gray. And that’s the point.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods won all of the Tonys in 1988 that Phantom of the Opera did not: book of a musical, and music and lyrics. It’s beloved in a way that few musicals are because it is so often produced by regional and school theaters, partly because it’s fun, funny, beautiful and sneakily deep, and partly because it’s a great ensemble piece, so there are a lot of roles. And I can’t count the number of gay men I’ve met who claim to have played the Baker. This sturdy film version will only make the show more popular.

The plot is actually absurdly complex, so I’ll just provide the basics. In fairy tale times (something like the Middle Ages), a Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily Blunt) desperately are trying to have a child. It turns out the Baker was cursed to sterility by his neighbor the Witch (Meryl Streep) because his father pissed her off. In order for her to reverse the course, the Baker and his Wife need to find a red cloak (from Red Riding Hood, played by Lilla Crawford), a cow as white as snow (from Jack, of the beanstalk fame, played by Daniel Huttlestone), a golden slipper (from Cinderella, played by Anna Kendrick), and hair as yellow as corn (from Rapunzel, played by Mackenzie Mauzy). They set off into the woods to find these items, and they find the items and the people who have them, all of whom are on their own quests for fulfillment. And they seem to find it. But a minute after you think they’re all going to live happily ever after, they don’t.

Rob Marshall, who directed Chicago to its Best Picture Oscar, does a lovely job with the swirling, twirling story, the lush art direction and the fantastic cast. Blunt and Streep are particularly great, with Blunt playing the show’s most fully realized character with bright charm and Streep chewing scenery with a great, snide cackle. Traci Ullman, as Jack’s mother, was surprising casting, and I wish she’d had a bigger role. Chris Pine, as Cinderella’s arrogant Prince Charming, is hilariously narcissistic.

The film differs from the stage show in a few odd and unnecessary ways, and what is the entire second act of the show takes up 30 minutes in the movie. It’s rushed and occasionally confusing, but when it’s time to get to the moral and emotional climax, the movie succeeds. This success is one of the more beautiful and bittersweet moments Sondheim and Lapine created. It’s not quite Christmasy, but it’s certainly more inspiring than a Clint Eastwood film about a professional killer.

Let’s get this out of the way: Despite what you may have heard, read on Twitter, or seen ranted about on Facebook, The Imitation Game is a not a homophobic whitewash of Alan Turing, the gay British man who broke the Nazi codes during World War II and more or less invented the computer. Despite his key role in winning the war, Turing was arrested for his homosexuality and forced to undergo chemical castration to avoid prison; he killed himself after a year of horrible hormone therapy. When the first trailer for the film (which is hyped Oscar bait produced by the Weinstein Company) was posted online, it seemed as if the film would focus on the relationship between Turing and Joan Clarke, a fellow codebreaker to whom he was briefly engaged. And Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, whose book the film is adapted from, complained about the script’s overemphasis on Clarke, as well as inaccuracies created for dramatic effect.

Few historians can stomach a Hollywood version of the history they know well, but as a gay man perhaps overly aware of homophobia in film, I found it very, very hard to complain about the film. Not only is the story framed by Turing’s arrest for homosexuality, but it is also thematically focused on the agony of keeping secrets and the injustice of a country he helped save destroying his life. The movie is the opposite of homophobic. And it’s quite good.

The film begins with a break-in a Turing’s house in 1952. The police come and he is dismissive, which makes them curious, and this curiosity leads to Turing’s arrest for homosexuality. The rest of the film is Turing telling a police officer about his secret life at Betchley Park, England’s top secret code-breaking facility during World War II. He was part of a team of mathematicians gathered to decipher the Nazi messages encoded by Enigma, an absurdly complicated and seemingly impossible to break encryption machine.

The awkward, humorless Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is making a career playing strange, sometimes unlikable geniuses – Sherlock Holmes, Julian Assange, Khan. (A lovesick teen version of Turing in another set of flashbacks is played by Alex Lawther.) He drives his fellow codebreakers, particularly Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), crazy with his casual insults and his refusal to do anything besides work on a machine he claims will counter Enigma, a machine no one else thinks will ever work. Betchley’s Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) hates him more than anyone.

Nevertheless, Turing gains control over his team, much to their and Denniston’s consternation, and he fires two members and recruits more with a test masquerading as a newspaper puzzle contest. Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) does the particularly hard puzzle faster than Turing can, and he invites her to Betchley. They become fast friends, because she is brilliant and because she believes in his work. When she says she must leave Betchley because her parents are angry that she’s 25 and unmarried and because they have no idea what she’s really doing, Turing asks her to marry him. She is clearly under no illusion that they’re romantically in tune.

Much of the film’s plot is focused on office friendships and petty politics, the rather turgid process of code breaking, reactions to Turing’s arrogance and off-kilter affect, and his mostly unspoken attraction to men. Screenwriter Graham Moore and director Morten Tyldum uses all of it to make us ponder the emotional cost of lying for good causes, sacrificing for a greater good and pursuing an abstract ambition over emotional contentment.

Cumberbatch and Knightley are both fantastic, though not as sublime as some awards prognosticators are claiming. Quirky, endearing, and compelling in their own odd ways, they make an adorable platonic couple.

Since Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar for playing June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, she has done very little to be proud of: doing bad movies, getting arrested and so on. But this year, the fruits of her renewed labor can be seen in Gone Girl, which she produced, and Wild, which she produced and stars in. She could potentially receive three Academy Award nominations this year, two for producing those quite fine films and one for acting. I think it’s safe to say the nomination for Best Actress is a lock, and I hope Wild itself gets the votes, too, because it’s a beautiful, emotionally rich film and one of my favorites of the year.

Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir the movie is based on. The book is partly autobiography and partly the story of her six month trek of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Oregon. That she walked the trail isn’t as impressive – it’s been done by many people – as the fact that she walked it alone with very, very little hiking experience. The film and the book also explain why doing this is so powerfully cathartic to Cheryl; she has just extracted herself from a failed marriage, an addiction to heroin and some extravagantly self-destructive habits that seem to have been a failed coping mechanism to deal with the grief over losing her mother. While Cheryl walks and hikes and gets blisters and nearly starves and narrowly escapes rape and hypothermia, her earlier life is shown in flashbacks, many of which feature a luminous Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother.

The film is a story about triumphing over adversity and it’s a travelogue, and this makes for simple, if not obvious, storytelling. In hands lesser than screenwriter Nick Hornby’s I doubt the story would be as tightly and carefully told. But director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose direction made Dallas Buyer’s Club vastly better than its screenplay, took Hornby’s script and crafted a visual and emotional experience that goes far beyond the words, either Hornby’s or Strayed’s. Working with the genius cinematographer Yves Bélanger (who could easily have won Oscars for either Dallas Buyer’s Club or Laurence, Anyways), Vallée dwells on the beauty of the landscapes without sentimentalizing, shows Cheryl’s bad habits without being prurient and guides Witherspoon and Dern to flawless and naturalistic performances that could have easily gone the way of histrionic and pandering.

Vallée’s great work should be praised and rewarded, but Witherspoon and Dern are why the film is so moving. Cheryl’s experience, from grief to pride and from shame to redemption, is vast, and Witherspoon portrays the shifts, the details and ugly honesty of it all. Her versatility and charisma in this role remarkable; it’s much more impressive than the work that got her an Oscar. Dern is even better. As Cheryl’s ridiculously cheerful mother – cheerful despite poverty, despite a violent husband, despite cancer – Dern is heroic and ecstatic and as beautiful as any of the nature beauty on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

At the end of Catching Fire, the second film in The Hunger Games series, our hero Katniss Everdeen, played by Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, has managed to destroy the high-tech dome in which she and 23 other “tributes” from the 12 districts of the nation of Panem were fighting each other to death. The previous year, Katniss and her tribute partner Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) had won the Hunger Games, as this annual blood bath is called, but in forcing the overlords of the games to accept two winners and then becoming a national hero, she had angered President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the dastardly ruler of Panem. So, the next year he made previous winners, who had been promised riches and safety, compete in a special, 75th anniversary Hunger Games. This didn’t go well, and secret rebels used the games, while manipulating Katniss and Peeta, to start an uprising. When Katniss shot an arrow into the force field covering the forested game space on live television, she showed that Panem’s rulers were not invincible. The rebels saved Katniss, but the bad guys got Peeta.

The third film in the series, Mockingjay, Part 1, is based on one half of the third novel of Suzanne Clark’s series of the same name. The second and final part will be released next November. Part 1 opened last week after a brilliant marketing campaign by its studio Lion’s Gate. (This included widely distributed portraits of archetypes of each of Panem’s districts. My favorite was for District 10, which specializes in livestock production; Mr. LA Leather and HIV prevention activist Eric Paul Leue was the model. Google it.)

So much hype for a film can make it easily disappointing, but in this case, I wasn’t let down. While not as great as Catching Fire, which in itself was better than the first film, simply titled The Hunger Games,Mockingjay, Part 1 is a thrilling, unnerving, and expertly made set up for what is expected to be an explosive and what hopefully will be a fantastic finale to the series. I wish they’d not split the book in two and made the audience suffer such a horrific cliffhanger, but clearly Lion’s Gate wanted to wring out as much cash as possible from the franchise.

The film opens shortly after Katniss is rescued, when she wakes up to discover she is in the massive underground bunker-city of District 13, which the rest of Panem thinks was destroyed in the civil war that the Hunger Games supposedly commemorates. 13 is populated by always-at-the-ready soldiers and presided over by the calmly fearless President Coin (Julianne Moore). Coin and Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died during filming), who ran the games while secretly masterminding their destruction, convince Katniss to become the figurehead of the revolution, the symbol of freedom – the mockingjay. Katniss is at first reluctant and only focused on saving the imprisoned Peeta and figuring out whether she loves him or her childhood beau Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Coin and Plutarch send her back to her home, the mining-focused District 12, and she sees that Snow had massacred all but less than a thousand of the district in response to Katniss’ perfectly shot arrow at the games. Enraged, she realizes her duty.

The rest of the film focuses on the creepily cynical propaganda war between District 13 and Snow’s henchmen, along with some good gunfights and espionage. Francis Lawrence’s direction balances the science fiction action with scenes of more grounded emotional power, utilizing the extraordinary acting abilities of the cast that also include Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks (particularly hilarious this time), Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci and Natalie Dormer. Jennifer Lawrence (no relation to Francis) is given the biggest emotions to work with, and she goes big with them, particularly in her hysterical guilt over Peeta’s capture. I’m hoping that in Part 2, she does less crying and more asskicking.

I remember first reading about the strange case of John du Pont, the extremely odd heir to the du Pont fortune who was murderously obsessed with Olympic wrestlers, in an article in a gay newspaper 20 years ago. The supposition at the time was that no one could be as obsessed with wrestling as to build an Olympic training facility on his estate and pay dozens of absurdly fit young men to lift weights and roll around the floor with each other and not be gay. Not having thought much about du Pont after reading the article until I saw the film based on his ill-fated wrestling obsession Foxcatcher, I was a little surprised when the film depicted him as not a creepy gay man with too much money and no boundaries but rather just a creepy man with too much money and no boundaries (as well as sundry mental illnesses). Internet research more or less corroborated the film’s version of du Pont, who is played with a hideous prosthetic nose and many, many mannered ticks by Steve Carell, making a grand play for seriousness and an Oscar.

The film itself is Oscar bait: It’s based on a depressing true story, directed by an Oscar nominee Bennett Miller, written by Oscar nominees E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, and features actors either on the cusp of seriousness, like Carell and Channing Tatum or already there, like Oscar-nominee Mark Ruffalo and five-time Oscar-nominee, one-time winner Vanessa Redgrave. Miller has already won the Best Director prize at Cannes for Foxcatcher, and the film is being promoted as an award magnet. And I think it will get nominated for a bunch and win a few, though maybe not at the Academy Awards. As wonderful as its pedigree is, and as handsome as it looks, the film is too cold and too enigmatic. By the end, the weirdness of the story never gives way to insight, just gloom.

Both Mark Shultz (Tatum) and his brother David (Ruffalo) won gold medals at the 1984 Olympics, and while David parlayed his fame to a coaching job, Mark is at loose ends, living alone and training with a scowl. One day, out of the blue, Mark is asked to fly to Pennsylvania and meet John du Pont at his vast estate, Foxcatcher. du Pont tells Mark that he wants to create a world-class wrestling training facility and help bring America back to greatness. He’s obsessed with winning, and yet despises the trophies his mother’s horses have won. He seems to despise his mother. A lot.

Even though du Pont is clearly weird – awkward, snobbish, self-important, overly indulgent of alcohol – Mark is enamored by du Pont’s vision and decides to join him. David refuses to come, because he doesn’t want to uproot his family, but this helps Mark, who always felt he was in his older brother’s shadow. As Mark trains himself and a team of recruits, he begins to see du Pont as a sort of father figure. They become very close, and then too close, and things sour when du Pont brings David to Foxcatcher to fix the problems Mark had created. And then things start really going badly.

It’s hard to tell who made the film so starkly beautiful, the brilliant cinematographer Greig Fraser or Miller’s direction. But they are both at fault for making the film so icy and bleak, which works in many places but is relentless after two hours. Carell’s performance is showy and effective, in that he telegraphs crazy and desperate very well, but it’s also hammy and obvious. Tatum and Ruffalo, however, are brilliant. Ruffalo is always this good; everything he does on camera is sympathetic and believable. Tatum, who looks spectacular in a wrestling singlet but tempers the sexy with an awkward lumber, is surprisingly moving as a not-so-swift, very damaged athlete who just wants to win. I’d rather he get the Oscar nomination that Carell is campaigning for.

When you’ve seen as many LGBT-themed movies as I have, after a while the descriptor “gay coming of age” attached to a film makes me sigh. Really, another one? Part of my exhaustion with the genre is that they tend to have virtually identical plots, despite cultural or historic specifics, and another part of my exhaustion is my need, more than two decades after I came of age as a gay person, for stories about gay adults having adult problems, particularly ones that don’t have to do with coming out. (This is one of the reasons I loved the middle-aged gay marriage drama Love is Strange so much.) That said, when I sit down to watch these movies about teenagers discovering their difference, their sexuality and how they are going to perform their gender, I can’t help but identify with the hero and be moved. It’s hard to make comparisons about the intensity of an experience, but if I could, I’d say LGBT teenagers have much more powerful experiences of their adolescence, of their first love, of the first person they tell the truth to. Simply because we have it harder.

In this year’s awards-hungry version of the seemingly eternal story The Way He Looks, Brazilian teenager Leo has it doubly hard. Not only does he yearn for his new friend Gabriel, but he’s blind, too. Before Gabriel arrives at their school, Leo and his best friend Giovana are inseparable. She helps him home, reads instructions on the blackboard and steers him clear of the bullies. Leo is increasingly anxious about independence, and he fights with his justifiably protective parents and starts doing things that Giovana had always helped him do, like unlock his front gate.

Giovana seems to have a crush on him, but then Gabriel, with his curly locks and easy good looks, arrives and Giovana focuses on the new boy. The three of them begin to hang out, and then Gabriel and Leo are paired up on a school project. They talk and joke and compare musical tastes; Leo loves classical, and Gabriel loves Belle and Sebastian. The boys get closer, and Giovana gets jealous, and when she spends time with Gabriel, Leo gets jealous. One night, Leo and Gabriel sneak out so that Gabriel can watch a lunar eclipse and narrate it for Leo. After they part, Leo begins to realize he yearns for the other boy.

Aside from Leo’s blindness, the plot of The Way He Looks is pretty standard for the genre, and the film succeeds on the strength of the performances of the young actors. As Leo, Ghilherme Lobo is particularly impressive, only partly because he performs blindness so believably that I assume Lobo himself couldn’t see. His sweetness, frustration, sadness, confusion and teenage wonder are all easily, naturally communicated. Fabio Audi is Gabriel, and he easily creates the magnetism needed to have half a school develop crushes on him. His chemistry with Lobo’s Leo makes their tentative relationship particularly watchable, adorable and sexy. It’s too bad for Giovana, so perfectly awkwardly performed by Tess Amorim, that she doesn’t register on either of their sexual radars.

The Way He Looks is Daniel Ribeiro’s first feature, and it won the Golden Teddy for best LGBT-themed film at the Berlin Film Festival. The film is beautifully, sensitively directed by Ribeiro, who not only brought out tremendous performances by his young cast but also used Pierre de Kerchove’s naturalistic photography to great emotional effect. Ribeiro’s screenplay rests on too many familiar tropes – he has said that he was inspired as a teenager by Beautiful Thing, which the film too closely resembles – but I look forward to what he does next, hopefully with something more daring and original but just as moving.

Before I get into my review of Horns, I want to complain about a small part of the film that doesn’t have much of an effect on either the film’s plot or ultimately its quality. Two of the characters in the film, both childhood friends of the film’s hero Ig Parrish (Daniel Radcliffe), are secretly gay and only are able to admit it, and admit their lust for each other, because Ig has developed a weird, Satanic power to make people he meets be honest about their basest emotions. At one point, Ig manages to distract them by using his power to encourage them to finally consummate their relationship; Ig tells them to get over their fears and have some fun. Then one of the men, during the film’s final confrontation, is killed in a particularly gruesome fashion. (I guess that’s somewhat of a spoiler; I hope I’ve been vague enough.)

Back in the day, the presence of gay characters at all was something to celebrate, and these two are mostly good guys, if somewhat dopey. But they exist to be made fun of, and their gayness exists as a punchline and a sight gag – Look! They’re kissing! And then, they are disposable. Other characters survive, but the gay one does not, and beyond one double-take from Ig, his death isn’t even commented on. I’d rather gay characters be included in film ensembles, but the continued use of us as plot devices, kindling in conflict and the butts of jokes shows just how disposable we are to the culture at large.

Aside from this problem, which exists in many movies and even more TV shows, and a few other problems that I’ll get to, Horns is a cool little movie. It is based on the novel of the same name by Joe Hill, which is the pen name of Stephen King’s oldest son. Like King, Hill writes smarter-than-normal horror. In this case, Ig becomes a demon, of sorts, shortly after being accused of murdering his girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple). Everyone in his small town in Washington state thinks he’s guilty, even his parents, but Ig insists he’s not: He loved Merrin more than anything. Why is anyone’s guess, since she’s even less of a character than the doomed gay guy is.

The morning after breaking an idol of the Virgin Mary and pissing on candles left for a candlelight vigil in her honor, Ig wakes up with horns poking through his forehead. But it’s not just unsightly cartilage; people in his presence seem to lose their inhibitions. At the doctor’s office, a mother admits she wants to beat up her screaming daughter. At the local bar, the owner blurts out that he wants to burn the place down for the insurance, and he does it.

At first, Ig is horrified, but then he discovers how useful his newfangled power is, and he uses it to find out who really killed his girlfriend. There are flashbacks to their childhood, to their adolescence and finally to the night of Merrin’s death. The mystery isn’t terribly hard for anyone paying attention to unravel, but how the devil, demons, Christ, and small town thugs all fit into the story is a bit unpredictable. While Radcliffe, as usual, is wonderful — funny, sexy, fierce, and physical — the pacing of the film, either in the editing or because of director Alexandre Aya, is off, both too fast and too slow at odd times. Also odd is how Christianity fits into the plot and themes. It’s never quite clear what the morality of the story is or why exactly Ig gets these horns. But in horror, it’s better not to ask.

Sites like Gawker, papers like the National Enquirer and stations like HLN give it some serious competition, but local television news is still arguably the crassest, most cynical and often least ethical news medium in the United States. This has been the case for decades, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has become a cliché in the news business. In the disturbingly bonkers and rather amazing new thriller Nightcrawler, Nina (Rene Russo), the producer of a low-rated early morning news show in Los Angeles, takes that cliché and goes long: “Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” She’s telling this to Lewis Bloom, played by balls-out brilliant Jake Gyllenhaal, who is trying to break into the business of filming bloody breaking news for shows like Nina’s. These freelancers are called nightcrawlers, as they spend the nights wandering the city, waiting for their police scanners to announce a car crash or a murder that can be filmed and turned into the bleeding images that lead.

Lewis is not a heroic journalist, like Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men or Jane Craig in Broadcast News. He’s more akin to Diana Christensen in Network or Wayne Gale in Natural Born Killers, pathologically unethical and clearly amoral in his ambition to succeed, to beat his competition and win. He speaks almost entirely in the aphorisms of self-help books and online business classes, almost always with a broad smile and wide eyes. He’s solicitous and aggressive, and thus annoying in the way that bad salesmen can be. He’s also tightly gaunt, with a slightly off-kilter haircut. He’s the sort of man I’d cross the street to avoid.

At the beginning of the film, Lewis doesn’t even have the news on his radar; he’s trying to make money selling stolen scrap metal. When he’s driving back from an unpleasant sale – the scrap dealer was not charmed – he comes across a wreck on the highway. He gets out of his car to watch police officers try to save a driver, and a nightcrawler van drives up. Joe (Bill Paxton) responds to Lewis’ insistent questions about what he does and then drives off to another shoot. Lewis is inspired. He buys a camera and a police scanner and starts looking for mayhem to film. He takes his rough, first footage of a dying man being treated by paramedics to Nina, who buys it and encourages Lewis, even though he perplexes her.

Lewis’ shark-like determination leads to many sales to and sexual harassment of Nina, and he hires an intern to help him on the streets. Rick (Riz Ahmed) is desperate and not terribly bright, so he’s easy for Lewis to manipulate and use, and they become even more successful. But when they come across a mass murder in a mansion and Lewis films it before the cops arrive, events begin nearly to outpace even Lewis’ ambition. Lewis is smarter and more psychotic than I ever suspected, and the last 45 minutes of the film are thrillingly depraved. I was horrified and completely entertained.

This is the first film directed by Dan Gilroy, who wrote the lackluster Bourne Legacy and the cheesy Real Steel. This pedigree made it surprising that he not only pulls out Jake Gyllenhaal’s greatest performance but he also has given us the best thriller of the year. The two are inextricably connected, because it is Gyllenhaal’s unexpected actions and off-kilter affect that kept me on the edge of my seat and muttering “wow” over and over. Gilroy also handles the car chases and random violence on Los Angeles’ iconic streets with skill, evoking the L.A. noir of Drive and Heat. The film is disquieting and, even at its most fantastical, somewhat believable. Lewis may not exist, but the stories that he records for Nina’s broadcasts do. We’ve all seen them.

Michael Keaton and Edward Norton in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

One of the great lines – and there are many – in Birdman is spoken by Ed Norton’s lauded method-actor Mike Shiner to Michael Keaton’s blockbuster star Riggan Thomas, who wants to earn respect by appearing on Broadway: “Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.” The scene is happening on two levels. Riggan and Mike are arguing about Riggan’s reasons for doing Broadway, questioning his skills and his authenticity and his ego. But Norton is playing a version of himself, an absurdly gifted actor known for being difficult and loved by critics; he is prestigious and somewhat popular. Keaton is also playing someone like himself, an aging and fading star, known best for playing Batman and Beetlejuice, who is in a smallish film destined for Oscar season; he was once popular and now wants prestige. This meta-textual meaning makes the film both slyly funny and particularly immediate; it also raises the stakes for everyone involved. I’m not sure the film would work without this brilliant casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Because the film works. It’s innovative, constantly surprising, very funny and moving.
Riggan is a rich man from his role as Birdman in three massively successful superhero action films. Years later, divorced from Amy Ryan’s Sylvia and father to a troubled daughter named Sam played by Emma Stone, he is trying to become both relevant and important by writing, directing and starring in a play based on Raymond Carver’s iconic short story What We Talk about When We Talk About Love. The film begins with Riggan getting immensely frustrated with one of his actors, who conveniently gets hit on his head by a falling stage light. He’s replaced by Mike, who is sleeping with one of Riggan’s actors, a nervous gorgeous blonde played by Naomi Watts. Also in the play is Riggan’s girlfriend Laura, who may be pregnant, may be a lesbian and is played by Andrea Riseborough. Sam is also working on the play, as Riggan’s cranky, wise-cracking assistant, who Mike notices and starts pursuing.
While this plot could veer into either Bullets over Broadway comedy or Sunset Boulevard melodrama, the depiction of Riggan’s interior life makes the film wholly original. He has conversations with Birdman and when he’s alone he is able to throw things around with his mind, open and close doors, break vases, and possibly drop stage lights on the heads of bad actors. Whether or not Riggan is crazy or actually super powered is never really made clear, and the tension of whether we are watching reality or fantasy is sort of wonderful. But his depression and frustration and desire for relevance, to the world, to his daughter, and to his ex-wife, are all real. This is by far Keaton’s greatest performance, a true tour de force of versatility, believability and emotional honesty.
Keaton has never had material like Birdman, and he’s never had a director like Alejandro González Iñárritu, who elicited an epic performance from Keaton and an equally brilliant performance from Norton, whose Mike is a caustic, hilarious, nutty Lothario of surprising depth. Stone has thrilling confrontations with Keaton (in anger) and Norton (in lust) that I think will assure her an Oscar nomination to join theirs and that of Ryan, whose scenes with Keaton are the emotional center of the film. Iñárritu’s stagings and long, hand-held shots make these performances raw and spontaneous, though his methods also make them seem, ironically, as if they are live theater. The script he co-wrote also seems particularly stage-dramatic, in the references to Chekhov and the slapstick comedy Noises Off, but it works in expansive, fanciful ways that plays adapted for the screen often do not. It’s a film about plays and about film and actors and family and, in a way, the meaning of life, and it soars.

It’s hard to imagine a teacher worse than Terrence Fletcher, the jazz band leader at fictional Shaffer Conservatory of Music in New York who J.K. Simmons plays with terrifying, unpredictable, sadistic joy. Fletcher, something like a cross between a Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket and Delores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; foul-mouthed at times, falsely sweet at others, seemingly doing it all for good reasons, but quite possibly psychopathic. The student musicians allow him to reign over them like a mad king because he gets results, brilliant performances, competition wins, and eventually, jobs with major bands and orchestras. Whiplash is the story of what happens when Fletcher adds promising, young jazz drummer Andrew to the band and decides to torture him in order to make him great. It’s a weirdly discomfiting movie, because it does a better job of justifying torture than Zero Dark Thirty does. But like that brilliant thriller, Whiplash is also an extraordinary piece of filmmaking.

Miles Teller, the preternaturally talented star of The Spectacular Now and the upcoming Fantastic Four remake, plays 19-year-old Andrew, whose drumming practice opens the film. Fletcher suddenly appears and asks Andrew if he knows who he is. Yes, he replies. Then you know I’m looking for players, Fletcher counters. Suddenly, Andrew is auditioning, but for less than 15 seconds before Fletcher turns and leaves, only returning to pick up his jacket. Andrew is confused and crushed, and this is when I would say, “Screw it; this guy’s an ass.” But instead, it makes Andrew even more determined. He starts practicing and practicing, giving himself bloody blisters and unhealthy exhaustion. One day, Fletcher walks into the practice session of the lesser band Andrew was assigned to, and after playing 15 seconds of double-time swing, Andrew is asked to join Fletcher’s band.

On the first day, Andrew discovers just how unpredictable, terrifying and cruel Fletcher is when the band leader ejects a trombone player for thinking he was playing out of tune (but wasn’t) and then throwing a chair – a chair! – at Andrew for not playing the right tempo. Simmons, who is one of our better character actors, is clearly in control of Fletcher’s screaming, anger and violence. Simmons has carefully thought through every vocal inflection and threatening movement, just as Fletcher has. Andrew is turned into a musician who thinks nothing is more important that becoming the greatest, meaning that his girlfriend Nicole (Melissa Benoist) just gets in the way. Andrew will do anything; he may become another Fletcher.

Whiplash is essentially a duel film, a jazz version of Face/Off, and the young writer-director Damien Chazelle directs it like a thriller. Instead of guns and fists, Chazelle has drums and horns and a black-clad, sinister band leader. The music scenes are thrilling and intense and occasionally terrifying, particularly when Teller’s Andrew furiously tries to achieve the absurd drumming speed Fletcher wants. Sweat, blood and agonizing facial expressions result, and then Andrew really starts to self-destruct, not only physically but emotionally as well. The plot becomes much less believable toward the end, particularly in the final scene, but the naturalism of the performances and the explosive final musical number keeps the film from going totally tone deaf.

also playing:

Gone Girl

At your local multiplex

Ben Affleck, Lisa Banes and David Clennon in Gone Girl

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling thriller Gone Girl is suspenseful, creepy and surprisingly funny. In his best performance since Hollywoodland, Ben Affleck plays Nick Dunne, a small town bar owner who comes home to discover his wife missing. Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is beautiful, stand-offish and rich, and they hadn’t been getting along since they left New York to return to Nick’s hometown in Missouri. Amy’s disappearance becomes a national obsession, and the police, led by Detective Rhonda Boney (a wonderful Kim Dickens), suspects a very untrustworthy Nick killed his wife. But so much of the case is weird, and nothing is as it seems. Fincher’s direction is characteristically smooth and taut and he uses Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ great score and Jeff Cronenweth’s stunning, murky cinenamography to great effect. The film is long and occasionally absurd, but it’s great fun, particularly after the mad twist in the middle.

In the somewhat tired genre of British movies that focus on plucky working class folks winning contests and defying mores (The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, Brassed Off, etc.) the politics of class conflict are usually sublimated by the up-from-our-bootstraps plotlines. It’s actually kind of sinister how those films trivialize the experience of British coal miners, pensioners and factory workers. But while Pride, about a group of gay activists in London who set out to help striking miners in Wales in 1984, is firmly in that genre and suffers a bit for it, the film is actually about and never shies away from politics – labor politics, gay politics and the messiness of solidarity. This is not to say the film, the winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes, is a political dirge; it’s also a comedy, a romp and a tear-jerker.

In 1984 gay activism was radical and very lefty and the labor movement was in its worst crisis since the Depression. Part of the Thatcher government’s economic strategy was the drastic reduction of subsidies for the nationalized mining industry, and when it was announced that the government would shut down 70 pits, the entire mining workforce went on strike. Since long term strikes are exceedingly rare in the United States nowadays, we forget that the strikers are going without pay (since union-supplied “strike pay” is very low, if it exists), and that means there’s no money for things like food.

The eager gay activists in London who decided to help the miners do so by raising money to give the strikers for food, clothing and other sundries. The activists – young gay socialist Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), aging disco queen Jonathan Blake (Dominic West), college boy Joe (George McKay), lonely lesbian Steph (Faye Marsay), among others – raised a good sum of money for a group of striking miners in a randomly chosen town in Wales. When they tell the strike committee in that town about their work, their sweet, unassuming representative (Paddy Considine) invites them to visit. The activists agree and then realize just how terrifying they are, since rural Wales is not known for its friendliness to queer city folk. While they are warmly welcomed by town elders Cliff (Bill Nighy) and Hefina (Imelda Staunton) and plucky, young miner wife Siân James (Monica Dolan), many of the other townspeople are threatened and threatening.

Will they get along? Will they join forces in solidarity? Will everyone learn something about themselves? Will there be a dance sequence? If you’ve seen any of the movies in the genre, you can imagine what the answers to these questions are. Some of the resulting scenes are cloying, particularly when Dominic West is involved, since the lead cop from The Wire is wildly miscast as a campy gay man. But Schnetzer’s Mark is enormously charismatic as the fierce and idealistic ringleader of the gays, and Nighy and Staunton, two of Britain’s greatest living actors, are so good as their town’s quiet soul and loud conscience respectively that the film is raised to almost undeserved heights when they’re on screen.

The end of the film, which I won’t give away, is particularly powerful because of its honestly astonishing truth and because it is a reminder of how far gay rights have come, how far the labor movement has fallen, and how many movements are now unable to join with partners for the greater good. The gay rights movement, for intance, in its almost singular focus on marriage rights, has lost sight of its origins as a radical force focused on ending gender, racial and economic inequality. It’s a tad frustrating that a feel-good comedy released by an awards-hungry film division of CBS is what is reminding us.

When Jon Burroughs (Domhnall Gleeson) first sees Frank (Michael Fassbender), the lead singer of a ragtag little rock band for which he is randomly hired to play keyboards, his reaction is probably that of most of the audience watching the film Frank: What the hell? Here is a man with a giant, cartoonish fake head covering his actual head. He doesn’t take it off, ever – even to wash, to eat, or, as Jon notes, horrified, to brush his teeth. Without any facial expressions and with a mostly muffled voice, Frank is still able to exude charisma, and the band follows him to whatever place, mentally or physically, he wants to go.

Jon is a struggling songwriter in a dead-end job, and he joins up with the band (which is written as “Soronprfbs” but not pronounced by anyone) because it seems to be the only way he can make music. At first he is astonished by Frank and confused by the other band members (including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Scoot McNairy), all of whom are as mentally unstable as Frank, but then he drinks the Kool-Aid and becomes enamored with Frank and determined to make Soronprfbs an international success. By secretly Tweeting about Frank’s bizarre recording process and uploading YouTube clips of their strange performances, Jon gets the band enough attention to be invited to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where everything goes awry.

To say that Frank is a strange movie is perhaps unnecessary at this point. It is worth saying that it’s pretty wonderful, despite and because of its oddness. The film is very loosely based on the musician and comedian Chris Sievey and his alter ego, the large-headed Frank Sidebottom, who were both minor celebrities in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. The only real similarity between the film’s Frank and the original Frank is the head, as Sievey was not mentally ill, did take off his head occasionally, was successful for a while and died in 2010, while the film takes place last year. But Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan’s screenplay does something more interesting than a straight biopic of an odd duck; instead, they and director Lenny Abrahamson created a film that comments on the false romance of the mentally unstable artist, on the emptiness of Internet celebrity, and on what it means to be authentic, even while wearing a mask.

At its most basic, Frank is about a normal guy who has abnormal experiences. Jon is who most of the audience identifies with; he’s a bland schlub in suburban Britain who dreams of something bigger that he doesn’t quite have the talent to become. He reacts to Frank as we would, with confusion and then a kind of affection, since Frank is sweet, eager and sensitive. Gleeson, who is set to star in the next Star Wars film, is perfect as our guide into this weird world, wide-eyed and naïve at first before developing an unearned ego in his quest for greatness. He is a sly comedian and a natural everyman.

Fassbender, whose face is hidden for almost the entire film, manages to be a convincing cult figure solely through his voice and brilliantly awkward physical expressions. Gyllenhaal has a two-dimensional character to play – a hateful goth queen – but she makes Clara indelible. And Scoot McNairy, becoming one of the best character actors working today, delivers his off-kilter, often revelatory one liners with prickly subtlety. All of the actors have great fun with Ronson and Straughn’s screenplay (based on Ronson’s newspaper article), which is full of snark, quirk and irony, all of which combine to deliver a few profound and sincere messages.

Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Corey Stoll and Adam Driver in This Is Where I Leave You

Maybe I’m a bit more emotional or sentimental than some, but when I watch people in the movies and on TV react to death, I’m astonished by the lack of, well, sorrow. Filmed funerals often seem to be settings for dramatic meetings of mourners, such as Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne’s prophetic handshake at the end of the pilot for Gotham. Or they can be vehicles for comic discomfort, such as the Altmans’ crass one-liners, droll insults and eyebrow-raising impropriety at their patriarch’s funeral in Shawn Levy’s amusing, but ultimately mediocre new comedy This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, everyone mourns differently and we shouldn’t criticize someone for mourning a loved one incorrectly (since we don’t know their lives … usually), but when mourning becomes a slapstick circus, credibility is strained. I guess I shouldn’t think of This Is Where I Leave You as believable, since it’s a broad comic film, but it needs some dose of reality to do what it wants: give us feelings about love and death, remind us of our family squabbles and create empathy for the Altmans and for every supremely screwed up family on Earth.

And boy, are the Altmans screwy. Jason Bateman plays Judd, who thought he had the perfect wife, job and apartment until he came home to that apartment and found his boss having sex with his wife. Tina Fey is Judd’s sister Wendy, who has a career-obsessed, narcissistic husband and is carrying a blazing torch for her high school boyfriend Horry (Timothy Olyphant), who she ditched after he was brain damaged in a car accident. Their older brother Paul (Corey Stoll) can’t get his wife Alice (Kathryn Hahn) pregnant; worse, she clearly holds her own torch for her ex-boyfriend Judd. Adam Driver plays the youngest brother Phillip, who can’t hold down a job, has a tendency to get arrested and shows up with a fiancée twice his age (Connie Britton) who had once been his therapist. Jane Fonda plays their mother Hillary, also a therapist and a narcissist, who had written a book about the family that included, among other over-shares, details about her children’s masturbatory habits.

The film follows the family from the funeral through the week of shiva, the Jewish traditional mourning period that includes daily visitation at the family’s home. Hillary tells them that sitting shiva had been their father’s last request. The children are greatly annoyed they have to stay for a week, partly because they don’t get along and partly because they’re not at all religious; their father was an atheist. But they stay for the week and fight. Judd is appalled at his mother’s new, much larger breasts. Wendy insists on revealing Judd’s marital disaster. Judd also runs into an old girlfriend (Rose Byrne) and haphazardly woos her while everyone else’s relationships are run through the ringer. These are all very unhappy people, though they’re also very funny, mostly while being mean or wildly inappropriate.

The casting is impeccable and everyone is good and some are great. Bateman plays the most normal member of the family and he’s expert at being the straight man in insane comedies, though he seems a bit sleepy here. Fey is crass, gloomy and delightful, and I wish she’d had a much bigger role. Driver, basically playing a slightly more socially adept version of his character in HBO’s Girls, is terrifically funny and damaged and uncontrollable, while Fonda does the best work of her recent comeback. She’s gutsy and hilarious. They all deserve better than director Shawn Levy, who has made a successful career with middlebrow, often special effects heavy comedies. He can work with CGI, but he doesn’t have the subtlety or skill to create a believable domestic drama.

The best thing about getting past Labor Day is not, contrary to popular thought, the arrival of pumpkin spiced lattes at Starbucks, but rather the wide release of good movies to theaters. Of course, good movies do show up in the first nine months of the year, but movies like Boyhood, Locke, and Under Her Skin get lost in the deluge of X-Men, animated apes, tear-jerking teen romances that dominate the spring and summer. Fall is for movies hoping for award recognition at the end of the year, and while that means we get Oscar chumming schlock like August: Osage County and Lone Survivor, we also get serious, adult films like Her and 12 Years a Slave.It’s hard to know which will be which this year, but I’m betting that this year’s Sundance favorite that ends up with a bunch of awards for best screenplay will be The Skeleton Twins, a dark comedy about two siblings haunted by their father’s suicide and their own failure to love the right person.

The film opens with Milo (Bill Hader) drunkenly attempting to commit suicide with a razor and a bathtub and his sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig), with whom he had not spoken in 10 years, getting the call from the hospital just before she is to take a handful of pills. Milo is embarrassed when he wakes to see Maggie, but after awkward banter and a slight thawing, he agrees to leave Los Angeles and come stay with her and her husband Lance (Luke Wilson) in Maggie and Milo’s hometown in upstate New York.

Milo, a waiter and failed actor, is arch, sarcastic and gay, and he finds Maggie and Lance’s cutesy, weirdly earnest marriage eye-rollingly ridiculous. Maggie, an awkward dental hygienist who suffers her sadness in silence, is secretly taking birth control pills while Lance thinks they’re trying to get pregnant. She also takes classes – scuba, salsa, cooking – to meet other men, to, it seems, feel something strong and wrong. While Maggie tries to keep it all together, Milo starts working for Lance clearing brush – daintily, with a jaunty scarf – and visiting an old boyfriend (Ty Burrell), who is both very displeased and a little bit pleased to see Milo.

James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy in The Drop

The action is split between Milo and Maggie’s messy searches for love and fulfilment and their haphazard reconciliation. They have hilarious bonding sessions (one of which includes the best use of a Starship song in four decades) and horrible fights, they reveal and resurface secrets and wounds, and they fumble toward epiphanies. Hader and Wiig have known and worked with each other for years (both were key players on Saturday Night Live), and their comic and emotional chemistry are clear. They are believable siblings in their knowing, easy interactions and the palpable love they feel for each other, even when its clouded by depression, anger and history. It is not remotely an exaggeration to say that The Skeleton Twins is both Wiig and Hader’s best performance. Burrell, going serious as conflicted close-case, and Wilson, as the naively cheerful cuckold, are also excellent.

The acting is splendid, but Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman’s screenplay is the real star of the film. Making a winning film about depression, suicide, self-destruction and unforgivable mistakes is certainly not easy, and usually those movies are maudlin exercises in Tennessee Williams near-parody (see: August: Osage County). But Johnson and Heyman balance the humor and pathos perfectly, Wiig and Hader the lines and the scenes to create something beautiful, surprising and moving.

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Dennis Lehane, who wrote novels that became the films Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island, wrote the screenplay for The Drop, based on his short story Animal Rescue. The Drop is solid genre work – stoic hero, vulnerable moll, articulate mobsters and thugs out for their last score – but Lehane, per usual, gives his characters carefully shaded three-dimensions and delicious dialogue. And Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam lets the characters carry the story instead of using familiar noir stylistics to define the mood. Tom Hardy is Bob, a slow-talking, seemingly sweet bartender, who finds an abandoned pit-bull and nurses him back to health with Nadia, a wary woman with a past (Noomi Rapace). Bob works for Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini in his last role), who has made a series of terrible deals with Chechen thugs, including letting his bar serve as an occasional drop site for the night’s ill-gotten gains. Enter Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), Nadia’ ex, the dog’s original owner, and a braggart murderer. He is off his rocker and out to get Bob, among other things. As the four head to a collision, secrets are revealed and people are murdered. Gandolfini is doing a hard-luck version of Tony Soprano, but he does it wonderfully, especially with Lehane’s darkly hilarious lines. But the juicy center of the film is Hardy’s sexy, sweet and slightly creepy performance as Bob. It alone is reason to see The Drop.

]]>http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/09/18/a-dark-comedy-that-is-beautiful-surprising-and-moving/feed/0Movie review: ‘The Dog’ memorializes an extraordinary time in New York City and in gay historyhttp://lgbtweekly.com/2014/09/11/movie-review-the-dog-memorializes-an-extraordinary-time-in-new-york-city-and-in-gay-history/
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The Dog

It should come as no surprise that movies based on true stories are much more “based on” than they are “true.” Few actual series of events unfold in a perfectly coherent and concise way, and even less fit into the three-act structure around almost all modern films are constructed. For many years, movies with queer lead characters were almost always straight-washed. For instance, in the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, the quite homosexual Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo suddenly had a heretofore unknown female love interest. Things got marginally better after Stonewall, and in 1975, the then-young superstar Al Pacino played the bisexual would-be bank robber Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, a huge hit that went on to be nominated for five Academy Awards and is now considered a nearly flawless classic.

When I watched the film for the first time, I was impressed by how the film matter-of-factly portrays Sonny’s relationships with his wife and his boyfriend, whose sex change Sonny wants to pay for with the bank’s cash. This lack of moral judgment about homosexuality in 1975, in a Hollywood film, is impressive. Then I saw The Dog, the fascinating and fantastic documentary about the man upon whom Sonny was based, the bizarre and failed bank heist, early post-Stonewall gay New York, and the aftermath of the robbery and the film. Not surprisingly, the truth – at least the truth as presented in The Dog – is much more complicated than the rather tidy story in film.

The Dog is built around interviews with John Wojtowicz, who became Sonny in the film. John was never a Sonny; he occasionally went by Little John, because, as he tells us, his pecker is small. Amazingly, Pacino’s manic, ecstatic portrayal of Wortzik seems tempered when watching the real Wojtowicz speak. During the interviews, Wojtowicz is around 60, chubbier and white-haired, and in his thick Brooklyn accent, he’s full of jokes, self-aggrandizement, self-deprecation, and charisma. He first had sex with a man during basic training after he enlisted for Vietnam; he woke up one night to a fellow soldier giving him a blowjob. He let him keep going because, “it felt like a summer breeze.” He got married after his tour, but quickly started hanging out in the newly liberated gay hangouts in New York’s Greenwich Village. He would work the door at dances sponsored by the Gay Liberation Front because it was easier to pick up the newly out first-timers.

He met Ernest Aron, who would eventually become Elizabeth Debbie Eden, in 1971, and he tells us it was love at first sight. (In the film, Aron became Leon, played by Oscar-nominee Chris Sarandon.) It was a tempestuous love, too. They fought often, Aron would end up in psychiatric hospitals, and still, they had a very public, at the time very revolutionary, wedding at a restaurant in the West Village. Using footage taken by the journalist and GLF activist Randy Wicker, who also appears in the film, The Dog directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren manage to show us not only the GLF dances and meeting, but also this wedding and an interview with Wojtowicz’s beaming mother Theresa, who attended the wedding.

At first, Wojtowicz was extremely against his “wife” Aron’s decision to get sex reassignment surgery – as he says, he liked guys with tits and a dick – but eventually he realized it was what Aron needed. So, he decided to rob a bank to pay for it. (While The Dog only implies it and Dog Day Afternoon ignores it, the heist was probably more of a mafia operation gone awry than it was a fundraiser for Aron.)

As in Dog Day Afternoon, the real robbery became a media circus and then a tragedy. But Wojtowicz survived prison, getting released early with help of a new wife he met inside and going on to use his minor celebrity status to make money off of autographs and appearances. Not surprisingly, Wojtowicz’s life didn’t end in the notoriety that he reveled in during the 1980s. Neither did Eden’s. But The Dog memorializes them, as well as the wonderfully cantankerous Theresa and an extraordinary time in New York City and in gay history.

Why Ira Sachs titled his latest film Love is Strange is unclear. Nothing about the love depicted in the film – between Ben and George, together for 39 years; between Elliot and Kate, together 19 years; between young lovers Ted and Roberto; between Eliot and Kate and their son Joey – is remotely weird. These are all utterly familiar relationships, at times tender, frustrated, warm, resigned and relaxed. While their love is actually quite ordinary, the situations Sachs and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias put their characters through is definitely odd, even unbelievable. But within this mixture of the familiar and the weird is a touching, often beautiful, and often quiet film about gay marriage, straight marriage and the hopes and expectations we place on our families.

The film begins with Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) marrying in a garden in the West Village of New York and celebrating with their delighted, adoring friends and family in the immaculately appointed apartment. Kate (Marisa Tomei), the wife of Ben’s nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows), gives a toast declaring Ben and George the greatest couple she’s ever known, and everyone cheers. Ben and George seem to have the ultimate upper middle class homonormative life; I was a little jealous.

In the next scene, however, we see George at work, directing the choir of a Catholic school. The head of school calls him to his office and tells him that because George and Ben made their marriage so public by posting it on Facebook, the bishop has demanded that George be fired. (This even wouldn’t happen if the religious-exemption-less ENDA was passed.) Suddenly, Ben and George have to sell their apartment and ask their closest family and friends to put them up while they find a new home.

How they could have afforded the place on the salary of a choir director – when Ben was a retired unsuccessful painter – isn’t clear. And even less clear is why the two are forced to stay in separate places during the horrible transition; Ben is in the lower bunk of Kate and Elliot’s son Joey’s bunk bed and George is on the couch at Ted and Roberto’s. Housing in New York is crazy, but this seemed like the manipulation of the screenwriters’ marionette strings, not the natural course of events. Sachs and Zacharias wanted to get Ben and George discomfited by different family lives and different love styles.

Ben is in the most emotionally wrought situation. Elliot is never home, Kate can’t get work done with Ben always around chatting with her, and Joey is a teenage boy, confused, awkward and resentful of the demands of the adults around him. George, on the other hand, is just an old guy living with socially active young gay men, and he’s annoyed with their late, loud parties. After four decades of domesticity, they hate being apart, and the scene in which George shows up crying at Kate’s late at night, in the pouring rain, just so he could sleep with his husband is immensely touching.

As the film progresses, Sachs and Zacharias throw a number of curveballs at the characters, some weird and implausible and others rather clichéd. But the actors and Sachs’ beautiful and sensitive direction of them ground their lives and their emotions in a recognizable, bittersweet reality. Everyone in the cast is excellent, but Lithgow is particularly amazing as the adorably ditzy, powerfully wise, achingly sweet Ben.

It’s not as flashy a role as Christopher Plummer’s Oscar winning Hal Fields in Beginners, but Lithgow is just as good, playing something we need in American films: a great gay man, aging gracefully.

MOVIE REVIEW

Love is Strange

Directed by Ira Sachs

Written by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias

Starring John Lithgow, Alfred Molina and Marisa Tomei

Inexplicably rated R

Opens Aug. 29 at Landmark Hillcrest

]]>http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/09/04/just-what-we-need-a-great-gay-man-aging-gracefully/feed/0An indelible American story about the cycle of povertyhttp://lgbtweekly.com/2014/08/21/an-indelible-american-story-about-the-cycle-of-poverty/
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Rich Hill

Andrew is 13 years old and lives in rural Missouri, in a town an hour or so from Kansas City. He is a handsome kid, articulate and wise beyond his years. He’s also often cheerful, and I found this surprising and endearing. In Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos’ extraordinary documentary about three adolescent boys in Rich Hill, Mo., Andrew’s life is profoundly hard; he and his family are trapped in poverty and constantly focused on day-to-day survival.

About an hour into the film, Andrew tells the filmmakers, “I praise God. I worship him. I pray to him every night. Nothing’s came, but that ain’t going to stop me. This is what goes through my mind: God has to be busy with everyone else. Eventually, he will come to my life. I hope it happens. It’s gonna break my heart if it don’t.”

Rich Hill, which won the documentary competition at Sundance this year and will likely be shortlisted for an Academy Award, is a powerfully affecting film about the cycle of poverty in rural white middle America. Palermo and Tragos (who are cousins) followed three boys living in the small country town, recording their family squabbles, their school conflicts and their dreams, fears, teenage obsessions, and, like Andrew’s prayers, their understandings of the world they’ve been born into. Palermo’s ability to capture the most profound utterances of the boys and their families and Tragos’ aching beautiful cinematography – reminiscent of a cross between Dorothea Lange’s photography of Depression-era farmworkers and Terrance Malick’s epic landscapes – combine to create an indelible American story of the stale underside of the American Dream.

In addition to Andrew, the film focuses on 15-year-old Harley and 12-year-old Appachey. Harley is clearly the most dynamic of the three, partly because of his funny, sometimes charismatic monologues and partly because of his uncontrollable temper. He loves knives and his mother. But he lives with his grandmother because his mother is in prison, convicted of attempting to kill Harley’s stepfather, who had raped him and was never charged. The anger seething inside Harley is justifiable, and he can barely keep it in check, his hands shaking in fury as an assistant principal tells him, no, he cannot go home pretending to be sick for the umpteenth time in a month. His grandmother is heroically patient.

Appachey is not nearly as talkative on camera as Harley and Andrew. He’s younger, and he also has a series of psychiatric problems, from ADHD to possibly Asperger’s. His mother Delena speaks more, and she’s clearly overwhelmed by her son’s difficulties, his fighting, his willfulness and her own limitations. She’s a single mother with two kids and a waitress job; she says she left her mother’s house at 17 and immediately got married. “I never had dreams.” She can’t seem to get Appachey to take his medications or to behave in school and wonders whether institutionalizing him will be the only way to control him and relieve her.

Andrew seems to be the most recognizable figure in the film because the poor boy with gumption and a smile is an archetype in American narratives. And it’s Missouri, too; he could be Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. He could be a Horatio Alger character, pulling himself up from his bootstraps every time he leaves school and immediately starts mowing lawns for anyone who will pay him. But his mother is ill and his father, who does odd-jobs, cannot make ends meet. Andrew and his twin sister are being moved constantly and the struggle is continuous. In the stories American kids are told or are told to read, the boy like Andrew always ends up succeeding. In Rich Hill, we see that this plot is just a myth. Hard work and initiative and belief in God are not enough to escape poverty. And watching Andrew wait for God to get to his life and help him is heartbreaking.

I cannot pretend to be an expert on Catholicism, let alone Irish Catholicism. My entire experience of the Catholic Church has been created by history classes I took more than 20 years ago, a few masses I attended out of curiosity and a large number of movies about priests and nuns, which run the gamut from the happy go lucky habits of Sister Act to the evil priests in Angels & Demons to the really, really evil nuns in Philomena. It’s pretty rare, for a number of reasons, to see a pro-Catholic movie, especially nothing like the Oscar-winning A Man for All Seasons, which told the story of how Thomas More’s refusal to accept Henry VIII’s break from the Church led to his beheading. But John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary comes close to depicting positive Catholicism, if not a positive church. Calvary depicts the week in the life of a truly good priest, played by the great Brendan Gleeson, a man who takes the sacraments and their meanings seriously, who always tries to do the right thing, even to the point of mimicking Jesus at his most holy. This probably sounds incredibly dreary or pedantic, but the film is fascinating, often entertaining, and finally heartbreaking.

Gleeson is perfectly cast and perfectly performs Father James, a middle-aged parish priest in a small town in Sligo, Ireland. He entered the priesthood late in life, after he had a daughter and after his wife died. He’s a bear of a man, tall and rotund, with a red and gray beard to match is hair. He’s also witty and ironic and has trouble suffering fools, the parish’s other priest Father Leary (David Wilmot). The film and the week begins with James taking confession from a man who tells him that he had been raped constantly by a priest for five years when he was a child. The man then tells James that he’s going to kill him in a week because killing a good priest makes more of a statement than killing a bad one. This is an odd logic, but the anger and the trauma of the abuse creates an odd logic. While James knows who the future killer is, he doesn’t reveal it to the audience or to his barely caring bishop.

Instead, James goes through the week, ministering to the motley crew of his parishioners and spending time with his visiting daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly), who is recovering from a suicide attempt. He tries to deal with the failed marriage between Veronica and Jack Brennan (Orla O’Rourke and Chris O’Dowd), which has led to bruises on her face, which came either from Jack or her lover, an African immigrant named Simin (Isaach De Bankolé). An aging American writer (M. Emmet Walsh) is trying to finish a novel while contemplating suicide. A rich drunk (Dylan Moran) pesters James while wallowing in his misery and his money; an emotionally stunted young man (Killian Scott) tells James that he’s developed murderous fantasies about women because he can’t get laid and a gay prostitute (Owen Sharpe) with a fake Bronx accent flirts with James just to get a rise out of him; he fails. Aiden Gillen plays a cynical, atheist doctor who provides gallows humor when James is at the hospital to minister last rights.

As the week progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that James is bearing the brunt of the anger against the Church for things he had nothing to do with. That he accepts the anger and does his best to push his parishioners and other townspeople to do the right and the good things makes James rather heroic. He gets angry, he fails often, but even when it seems as if he’s going to run away from it all, he decides to do [spoiler!] what Jesus did at Calvary, and become the repository of the town’s sins in order for them to be saved. It’s an upsetting, yet oddly beautiful ending to a moving, funny, profound film.

I must admit that the biggest reason I was so excited to see Guardians of the Galaxy was Chris Pratt. I’ve been a fan since he guested as trustafarian college student on The OC in 2006, and I developed a silly school boy crush on him in Parks & Recreation, on which he’s played adorable dimwitted man-child Andy Dwyer for seven years. For much of his career, he’s carried some chunk, earning more than a few bear fans. After he was cast as a Navy Seal in Zero Dark Thirty, he started working out, and suddenly he went from dopey comedic sidekick to leading man, getting cast as the lead in the next Jurassic Park film and as Peter Quill, or Star-Lord, in Marvel’s massively budgeted space opera Guardians of the Galaxy.

I’d probably pay to see Pratt eat cupcakes for two hours, but I was quite happy when Guardians turned out to be hugely entertaining. It is not, however, deserving of the extreme adulation it has been receiving. Three days after its release, the voters on IMDb have declared it the 32nd greatest film of all time. This is, of course, absurd. Fanboys can get overexcited, and they can also develop blinders, not noticing the flaws in their obsessions.

Perhaps one of the reasons so many people loved Guardians is that, unlike Spider-Man, the X-Men, or Captain America, the Guardians of the Galaxy are not a group of superheroes so well known that any filmed representation of them is bound to be sneered at by legions of comic readers whining, “That’s not right! Star-Lord’s mom didn’t die that way!” (I uttered that sort of whine in my review of the latest X-Men film a few months ago.) In fact, a lot of people were perplexed that Marvel would make a movie based on characters that weren’t already a worldwide brand. With the $200 million budgets, that’s a risk, especially without a superstar to carry the film, like Robert Downey Jr. did for Ironman. The risk paid off, however.

The film opens with Peter as a young boy. He is sitting alone in a hospital waiting room, listening to a mixtape on his Walkman. He is ushered into a hospital room, where his mother is dying. Peter is confused and scared, and after she succumbs, he runs from the hospital in tears. Suddenly, a space ship appears and beams Peter up. Twenty-six years later, Peter is played by Pratt, and he is on a strange, barren planet. In a scene more than a little reminiscent of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Peter is searching ancient ruins for an artifact: a mysterious metal orb. So are a bunch of other mercenaries and evildoers (played by Michael Rooker and two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou), and Peter barely escapes with his life.

While he tries to sell the orb on the planet Xandar, two bounty hunters, the furry Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and hilariously taciturn and wooden Groot (Vin Diesel), and green Gamora (Zoe Saldana), one of the henchmen of the evil Ronan (Lee Pace), attack Peter to get the orb. Instead, they all end up on a prison planet, where criminals and enemies become allies and heroes. Along with the super-literal muscle man Drax (Dave Bautista), they break out and try to prevent Ronan from using the orb to destroy Xandar.

From the moment young Peter runs out the hospital, the action barely pauses for more than the amount of time needed for a brief plot explanation, a quick joke or a testament to revenge, honor or friendship. The pacing is breathless, and the cosmic, superheroic action – impressively directed by James Gunn almost entirely in CGI beautifully designed by Charles Wood and photographed by Ben Davis – is as thrilling as what Joss Whedon did in The Avengers or George Lucas did in the first Star Wars. But the nonstop action prevents any of the characters from developing into more than just, well, cartoons. I could tell Rocket and Groot had a long and deep friendship and I knew Peter and Gamora were hot for each other, but the details, the explanations and the emotions are left out.

I loved watching Pratt become a movie star, but the movie sent me to the richer, more complicated comic books, where I could learn something about the character he was playing. The film provided only a hint.

One of the problems Woody Allen faces when he is trying to defend himself against charges of pedophilia is how often the male protagonists in his films, usually well into middle age, pursue and win the affections of much, much younger women. Most notoriously, he cast himself, at age 42, as a man dating 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in 1979s Manhattan; this year, he revealed this story was based on his relationship with a high school student he met on the set of Annie Hall.

In 1991, Allen left his longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow for her 19-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-yi Previn, who Allen has been married to since 1997. Dating women just above the age of consent is not pedophilia, of course, just very often icky, but Allen has also been accused of molesting his and Farrow’s daughter Dylan when she was seven. Allen vehemently denied the charges, but that scandal was omnipresent in the early 1990s, even after the police decided they did not believe Dylan and a judge found the charges inconclusive. However, the charges reappeared last winter, when Dylan, now named Malone and an adult, repeated them in detail to Vanity Fair and then in an open letter in The New York Times. This set loose a deluge of blog posts, Tweets and status updates taking either Malone or Allen’s side, with everyone claiming to know a truth that time and emotion have made impossible to determine.

Rarely does Woody Allen use his films to comment on politics, let alone on his personal life. Neither his break up with Mia Farrow nor his relationships with Soon-yi seem to have been fictionalized in any concrete way. He often focuses on issues of love, shame, class and beauty, but finding the connections in Allen’s plots and character to his actual life has been folly. That said, in his latest film, the slight romantic comedy Magic in the Moonlight, the connection and the commentary seem rather clear, making obligatory romance between the middle-aged man and much younger women much ickier than ever.

In the 1920s, Colin Firth plays Stanley, a stiff British rationalist who does not suffer fools gladly yet happily makes money fooling them as a stage magician named Wei Ling Soo. After a show one night in Berlin, an old friend and fellow magician named Simon (Simon McBurney) visits and asks Stanley if he’d be willing to come to the French Riviera and help unmask a woman pretending to be a psychic whose act is particularly skillful. Exposing fakers is one of Stanley’s favorite hobbies and his Aunt Vanessa (Eileen Atkins) lives nearby, so he agrees. Upon meeting Sophie (Emma Stone), the mystic in question, Stanley pokes and prods the beautiful, young American, but he is increasingly unnerved as she seems to be able to read his mind and know things only a psychic could. Within days, he is as taken in by her as the rich family she and her mother is staying with who has been hanging on her every word. The son Brice (Hamish Linklater) is in love with Sophie, who is coyly weighing his marriage proposal. But now Stanley is in love with her, too.

The film is, as all of Allen’s are, full of dialogue as witty, wise and funny as the best written in English, and it is directed with the bounce and effervescence expected of his light comedies. Firth, who rarely plays anyone other than a witty fuddy-duddy does this particularly wonderfully, and Stone, the only young American actress who can compete with Jennifer Lawrence in a charm contest, is also delightful. They are cute together, but Firth is more than twice Stone’s age, and when they kiss, it’s truly creepy. But it is not as creepy as the connection between the plot and Allen’s life. Stanley is determined to expose the lie of a very young woman, a lie central to her and her mother’s survival. The lie, and the desire to expose and be taken in by it, seems to me to represent Malone’s claim of abuse and the ease by which people believed it. By the end of the film, Allen makes a pretty clear statement about magical thinking, but the resolution is not comforting for those discomfited by Allen’s predilections.

Few film franchises have been rebooted as successfully as Planet of the Apes. When Rise of the Planet of the Apes arrived in 2011, audiences were still smarting from Tim Burton’s bloated and boring remake of the eponymous 1969 film that started the series. No one had very high expectations that a little known director and a screenwriter whose previous film was 1997s The Relic would have much success. But Rise was a revelation, combining emotionally rich stories about fathers and sons with CGI so exquisite the apes seemed, well, real. At the end of the film, the research that helped make the apes smart and capable of speech also ended up creating a virus that killed 99.8 percent of the human population, setting up the ape-ruled world in the future. The movie earned rave reviews, a huge group of new Apes fans and great anticipation for its sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is now out. It’s a great science fiction action film, but despite what some fans are claiming, it’s hardly perfect.

Dawn takes place 10 years after the events in Rise, with very few humans left alive and those who survived are isolated and increasingly desperate. The super-smart apes from the first film have settled into the Muir Forest north of San Francisco, where they are led by Rises’ hero Caesar (Andy Serkis, doing motion-capture). The colony has multiplied and thrived, with only the elders remembering the horrible treatment they faced as captive science projects.

Caesar’s best friend Koba (Toby Kebbel) is particularly scarred, both literally and psychologically. When his son is shot by a terrified human named Carver (Kirk Acevedo), Koba is the first to demand swift, violent revenge. Instead, Caesar is persuaded by a human named Malcom (Jason Clarke) to allow Malcolm and other survivors from San Francisco to restart a hydroelectric dam in the ape’s territory. Because of Carver’s loathing of apes, who he blames for the plague, and Koba’s loathing of humans, who he sees as dishonest and cruel, the truce between the humans and apes becomes increasing tentative. Finally, after Koba watches the humans, led by a former soldier named Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), in San Francisco massing arms for a coming battle, correctly assuming the apes are their target but incorrectly assuming the attack was imminent, he takes a page from Hitler’s early playbook and starts all-out war.

As with Rise, the computer-generated special effects are wondrous, and unlike the Pandorans in Avatar or the various creatures in Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, the apes are believable, not only in their physicality but in their emotional depth. They are more sympathetic and, oddly, better actors than the humans. Serkis and his animators created a more interesting – charismatic, wise, and agonizingly moral – character than Clarke, Oldman or Keri Russell (as Malcolm’s girlfriend) do. Mostly this is because Caesar is a better and better-written character. The humans are a bit dull, and a few of them are written as plot points, annoying ones. Carver is the worst action film trope, the angry, dumb guy with an itchy trigger finger. Russell’s character Ellie, the only female in the film to speak, is a walking stereotype, the smart motherly hero.

It’s been a summer of films about future dystopias, and like most science fiction, their plots are commentaries on contemporary anxieties. X-Men: Days of Future Past is about pre-emptive strikes and the fear of technology, and Snowpiercer is about how climate change will exasperate economic inequalities.

Dawn is about war, trusting and mistrusting the other, and the vicious power of old traumas. It was hard for me not to think about the current war between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, though the film, made last year, is probably not commenting on that. The filmmakers are showing that war seems to be both absurd and inescapable, started by anger and selfishness, and suffered by so, so many innocents.

With its utterly fatalistic ending, Dawn depicts the bleakest of this summer’s dystopias. Whether or not this is entertaining is unclear.

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Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater and Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood

Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over 12 years. This is what you hear when the movie is discussed, and it’s an important fact. In 2002, he cast a boy (Ellar Coltrane), his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke). Both Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater were eight years old at the time, though they were playing six and seven respectively; Arquette and Hawke were both major Hollywood actors in their early thirties, playing a recently divorced couple in Texas. Then Linklater filmed them for three or four days every year until Coltrane’s character Mason graduated from high school and went to college, taking them through growing pains, stepfamilies, first loves and the burgeoning self-awareness of adolescence. Linklater deserves a slew of awards simply for overcoming such a film’s logistical difficulties – flighty children, lengthy contracts, the ravages of time and history – but he and his actors also managed to create a film as true to the emotional journey of childhood and modern American family life as any in a generation.

Like the life that Linklater is depicting, Boyhood does not have a plot as much as it has a series of vignettes focused around key moments in Mason’s childhood. At the beginning of the film, his mother is struggling, he and his sister Samantha (the younger Linklater) are squabbling, and their father, their mother’s ex, is a somewhat listless manboy who loves his children but does not know how to be a good father. The parents fight when Mason’s mother comes home after his father had them on a day of fun and the kids have not yet done their homework; Mason and Samantha watch them argue from an upstairs window and wonder whether they’ll get back together.

A few years later, the mother brings Mason to her psychology class, where he meets her professor, who ends up becoming Mason’s first stepfather. While he has money and children Mason and Samantha’s age, it becomes quickly apparent that he is a bully and a drunk, and the mother, Mason and Samantha are forced to flee. In a new school and a new town, Samantha is livid as teenagers often are, while Mason is scared, confused and watchful. His mother overcomes abuse and poverty and his father overcomes immaturity and impossible dreams, and Mason marvels at the beauty in front of him, recording it through his camera lens.

As he grows older – through junior high, drinking with friends, trying to act older, his first job, dealing with his mother’s next husband – Mason is quiet as he observes the world around him and struggles to live up to the expectations of his parents and parental figures. When he does speak, his vocalized introspection is precocious but never seems to be written by Linklater, but rather it seems to come authentically from Mason, channeled by the brilliant young Coltrane.

Like many adolescents, Mason makes pronouncements that verge on delusions of grandeur, and they are sweet and funny, but they are also utterly believable. The last scene of the film, for instance, depicts him and three new friends from his college dormitory finding enlightenment through mushrooms. They speak in the banalities of mistaken profundity, and I found it oddly glorious.

Linklater’s naturalistic direction, with which he made minor masterpieces in Dazed & Confused and the Before Sunrise trilogy, is perfect for Boyhood. The film feels like a documentary, like cinéma vérité, but the emotional power of his choices in editing, of the acting he elicited from his actors both young and old (particularly Arquette, doing the best work of her career), and in the beauty of his landscapes and light is something we usually only see in finely crafted narrative films.

Boyhood is not perfect – it’s long and rough in places and the plotting seems a bit forced at times – but it is nonetheless an extraordinary monument to the power of art, film and family.

MOVIE REVIEW

Boyhood

Written and Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke

Inexplicably Rated R

Opens July 18 at Landmark Hillcrest

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Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater and Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood

Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over 12 years. This is what you hear when the movie is discussed, and it’s an important fact. In 2002, he cast a boy (Ellar Coltrane), his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke). Both Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater were eight years old at the time, though they were playing six and seven respectively; Arquette and Hawke were both major Hollywood actors in their early thirties, playing a recently divorced couple in Texas. Then Linklater filmed them for three or four days every year until Coltrane’s character Mason graduated from high school and went to college, taking them through growing pains, stepfamilies, first loves and the burgeoning self-awareness of adolescence. Linklater deserves a slew of awards simply for overcoming such a film’s logistical difficulties – flighty children, lengthy contracts, the ravages of time and history – but he and his actors also managed to create a film as true to the emotional journey of childhood and modern American family life as any in a generation.

Like the life that Linklater is depicting, Boyhood does not have a plot as much as it has a series of vignettes focused around key moments in Mason’s childhood. At the beginning of the film, his mother is struggling, he and his sister Samantha (the younger Linklater) are squabbling, and their father, their mother’s ex, is a somewhat listless manboy who loves his children but does not know how to be a good father. The parents fight when Mason’s mother comes home after his father had them on a day of fun and the kids have not yet done their homework; Mason and Samantha watch them argue from an upstairs window and wonder whether they’ll get back together.

A few years later, the mother brings Mason to her psychology class, where he meets her professor, who ends up becoming Mason’s first stepfather. While he has money and children Mason and Samantha’s age, it becomes quickly apparent that he is a bully and a drunk, and the mother, Mason and Samantha are forced to flee. In a new school and a new town, Samantha is livid as teenagers often are, while Mason is scared, confused and watchful. His mother overcomes abuse and poverty and his father overcomes immaturity and impossible dreams, and Mason marvels at the beauty in front of him, recording it through his camera lens.

As he grows older – through junior high, drinking with friends, trying to act older, his first job, dealing with his mother’s next husband – Mason is quiet as he observes the world around him and struggles to live up to the expectations of his parents and parental figures. When he does speak, his vocalized introspection is precocious but never seems to be written by Linklater, but rather it seems to come authentically from Mason, channeled by the brilliant young Coltrane.

Like many adolescents, Mason makes pronouncements that verge on delusions of grandeur, and they are sweet and funny, but they are also utterly believable. The last scene of the film, for instance, depicts him and three new friends from his college dormitory finding enlightenment through mushrooms. They speak in the banalities of mistaken profundity, and I found it oddly glorious.

Linklater’s naturalistic direction, with which he made minor masterpieces in Dazed & Confused and the Before Sunrise trilogy, is perfect for Boyhood. The film feels like a documentary, like cinéma vérité, but the emotional power of his choices in editing, of the acting he elicited from his actors both young and old (particularly Arquette, doing the best work of her career), and in the beauty of his landscapes and light is something we usually only see in finely crafted narrative films.

Boyhood is not perfect – it’s long and rough in places and the plotting seems a bit forced at times – but it is nonetheless an extraordinary monument to the power of art, film and family.

In the first scene of Begin Again, a blond Brit named Steve (James Corden) finishes his song at an open mic night in New York’s Lower East Side and coaxes his friend Greta (Keira Knightley) onto stage. She reluctantly, almost begrudgingly sings “A Step You Can’t Take Back,” which she claims is new, and the audience barely notices. There is some polite applause, which Greta rolls her eyes at. She’s already down because, as we quickly find out, she has just broken up with a boyfriend of five years, an up-and-coming rock star (Dave, played by Adam Levine). However, in the middle of the crowd is an enrapt, drunk, mussed man (Dan, played by Mark Ruffalo) in his 40s, who is in awe. Neither the audience in the club nor in the movie theater knows why; the latter audience finds out ten minutes later when we see the scene from Dan’s perspective. As he watches Greta perform, he imagines other instruments joining in, all played by invisible musicians. Suddenly, the song soars. And we get a lesson in music producing, which is what Dan does for a living. Or had. He was fired that morning.

With this set up, the rest of the plot shouldn’t be too hard to predict. Dan persuades Greta to work with him. Dan needs to be redeemed as a producer after a drunken, depressed crash brought on by his divorce from Miriam (Catherine Keener) – which means he needs to be redeemed as a husband and father to Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), too. Greta needs to prove herself as a songwriter and performer after being relegated to being “Dave’s girlfriend,” particularly after Dave cheated on her with a record company assistant. Without any money, Dan and Greta decide to record an album entirely outside, from alley ways to rooftops. They recruit a band, pay them on the cheap, and start recording one delightful song after another. Meanwhile, they start developing a powerful, possibly romantic, friendship and work to repair their other relationships.

The plot of Begin Again is slight, using a few of the clichés of the let’s-put-on-a-show! genre and focusing on a rather simple redemption narrative in order to string together a bunch of beautifully directed musical performances. Writer-director John Carney’s last major feature, the magical Oscar-winning Once, had an even thinner story to link an Irish love story. That story was emotionally much more powerful, possibly because it snuck up on you, acted as it was by utter unknowns. Ruffalo, Knightley, Keener and Levine are the opposite. They are huge stars and are all a bit distracting at first. Can Knightley sing? Can Levine, an actual rock star, act? Is Ruffalo going to do that disheveled loser thing for the whole movie?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Knightley is always good, utterly convincing in both period dramas like Atonement and contemporary comedies like Bend it like Beckham. And she’s stunningly beautiful, as delicate as blown glass, and she has a sturdy charisma that standard ingénues tend to lack. With Begin Again, we discover she can also sing, with a voice something like a cross between Suzanne Vega and Lucinda Williams. Combining her emotional expressiveness and her voice makes for powerful musical numbers, particularly when she sings to Dave’s voicemail with “Like a Fool” or when she gleefully finishes the album accompanied by Violet’s guitar with “Tell Me If You Wanna Go Home.” Levine, who acts with smooth naturalism, gets the final song, however, singing the Greta-penned “Lost Stars” as a grand and gorgeous audition for the Oscars. (“Falling Slowly” from Once won Best Original Song in 2008.)

Ruffalo doesn’t sing in the movie; during the musical numbers that he is producing, he is mostly a conductor and infectious cheerleader. Dan is a stereotype of an aging music executive – his theme song is probably LCD Soundsystem’s “I’m Losing My Edge” – and Ruffalo’s performance is reminiscent of the early disheveled stoner roles that made him a star. As Dan and Greta grow closer, he becomes more believable. By the end, however, the film belongs to Knightley and Greta, who refuses to compromise, in music and in love.

For the last year, much of the discussion of Snowpiercer focused on the public fight between director Joon-ho Bong and Harvey Weinstein, the independent film mogul and owner of the Weinstein Company, which has the distribution rights to the film in the United States. Weinstein wanted the acclaimed version of the film seen overseas cut and, according to some reports, a voiceover added. This immediately caused ripples among the film community, because it was the added voiceover and happy ending to the original cut of Blade Runner that enraged so many people, particularly its director Ridley Scott. And Snowpiercer, Bong’s first English-language film and full of international stars, is considered by some to be as important a film as Scott’s 1981 masterpiece; time will tell on that end, but those fans are not crazy to make that prediction.

Bong, the great Korean director of the modern classics The Host, Mother and Memories of Murder, prevailed, and Weinstein released the original cut to select theaters. It’s an astonishing film, breathtaking in its visuals, bleak in its plot and enraging in its refusal to do what most American audiences expect from their science fiction action films.

The film is set in 2031, 17 years after an attempt to fix global warming goes horribly wrong, freezing the planet and killing all life. All life except for those who made it onto a long, high-tech train on a constant circumnavigation of the planet. The train was built by a visionary inventor named Wilford, who predicted the environmental calamity and manages the miraculous engine that keeps the train moving and its inhabitants alive. While the train features greenhouses, a fish farm, livestock, a school, restaurants, clubs, these luxuries are available only to the riders in the front of the train.

In the back, the riders live in squalor, surviving on blocks of mysterious, rubbery protein and subject to the violent whims of Wilford’s brutal security forces who steal the riders’ children and freeze the limbs off riders brave enough to fight back. These tail riders are plotting a revolution at the beginning of the film, with Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell), Tanya (Octavia Spencer), and the tail riders’ de facto leader Gilliam (John Hurt) trying to find the best moment to push through to the other cars, past the security forces and their absurd, saccharine chief, Mason (Tilda Swinton). When they do, recruiting the drug-addicted engineer Namgoong (Kang-ho Song) and his daughter Yona (Ah-sung Ko) to open the doors, things get very bloody, and as they pass through the various cars, very weird. As the film progresses, the critique of caste-like hierarchies and fascistic social manipulation becomes explicit and uncomfortable. Don’t expect a Hollywood resolution, since Bong has always refused happy endings.

While the plot and themes are bleak and get only bleaker, Bong’s trademark mix of humor and horror manage to make the process entertaining. The fight scenes are gorgeously shot by cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong, if Bong’s use of slow motion violence is perhaps clichéd at this point, even when filmed with such care and skill. The art direction of the different cars – from concentration camp filth to baroque splendor – is a marvel, and Stefan Kovacik will undoubtedly find himself nominated for various awards at the end of the year.

The screenplay that Bong and Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) adapted from the graphic novel of the same name is smart and unnerving, but it is not seamless, as the plot holes appear if you think about it for too long.

The acting is more consistent. Evans, who gives a wrenching, horrific speech at the end of the film that towers over anything he’s ever done before, and Song, the star of Memories of Murder are both thrilling in their confused desperation. Spencer, Bell and Hurt do great character work; it’s fantastic to see Spencer, an Oscar winner for playing a vengeful maid, as an action hero. Swinton’s performance, however, is the most memorable, not only because of the mannered speech and creepy dentures, but also for her communication of banal, mercenary evil.

A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with one of my best friends, a musical theater composer who has impeccable and refined taste. I had mentioned that I was going to review the Jersey Boys movie and he told me that when he saw the stage musical, it was so thrilling, “I wanted to throw my panties on the stage.” The musical was directed by the brilliant Des McAnuff, who also directed The Who’s Tommy and was the artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse when Jersey Boys premiered there in 2004. I never saw it on stage, but I take my friend’s word for it that the Four Seasons jukebox musical deserved the adulation and the four Tony Awards. I have to take his word because as a film, as directed by Clint Eastwood, Jersey Boys is nostalgic pabulum. Based on the film, it was hard for me even to understand why anyone would care so much about the Four Seasons, who are one of the most successful musical acts of all time, having sold more than 100 million records.

The film is a typical musical biopic, tracing the rise, peak fall, and redemption of the band. It is narrated by the four original members of the band in succession. First is Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), an ambitious New Jersey tough guy who claims the only way to get out of the neighborhood is join the army and probably die, join the mafia and probably die or get famous, like Frank Sinatra. He did the latter two, and it’s his mob connections that help propel the band he conceived, played bass and arranged vocals for onto the charts. Much of that has to do with putting his younger, unsure friend Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young) on lead vocals. Frankie, getting an ego, changes his last name to Valli before they meet the serious, wise and absurdly talented Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), the second narrator, who wrote or co-wrote all of the band’s hits. They meet Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle), a flamboyant producer, and with his help, release three number one hits in a row: “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and “Walk Like a Man.”

While this is happening, the band starts fighting, partly because Tommy resents Frankie and Bob’s talent and closeness and but also because Tommy’s financial and managerial control of the band veers between incompetent and criminal. Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) takes over narration as the band falls apart because of Tommy’s ill-advised dealings with a loan shark and his accrual of $500,000 in back taxes. Finally, after Nick quits, Tommy is kicked out of the band, Bob decides only to work in the studio, Frankie is left alone on stage, earning money to pay back the band’s debt and trying to repair relations with the family he left at home while he was on the road. Somehow, there is a redemption of sorts when Frankie sings “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which would have been a more interesting sequence if the true story of its inspiration was told: Bob Crewe came up with the lyrics while staring at his sleeping young male lover.

There’s certainly enough drama and certainly enough good songs for a stellar musical, but Clint Eastwood, known best for his no-nonsense naturalism, is a strange choice to make it. He does well with the 1950s New Jersey organized crime sections, but his staging of the songs is so, well, realistic that there’s little thrill to them. It’s felt as if I was just watching four guys singing. As usual with his movies, Jersey Boys has impeccable art direction, cinematography and editing, but unlike with Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, or Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood isn’t working with brilliant film actors. (A notable exception is the slyly hilarious Christopher Walken, playing a mafia don.) John Lloyd Young constantly over-expresses his emotions, as if he were still on stage, and Vincent Piazza seems to be doing a poor imitation of Ray Liotta from Goodfellas. Michael Lomenda and Mike Doyle provide comic relief, but it’s weirdly cheesy, like much of the film. Worst of all, at the end of the film, when the band reunites for their induction to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, the aging make-up is gasp-worthy terrible. They’re all supposed to be in their fifties, and they look like corpses. Who’d throw their panties at that?

When I reviewed 21 Jump Street two years ago, I praised the broad comedy about cops going undercover in high school for being very funny. But I was unnerved by how much of the humor was firmly based in homophobia. Officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are such good friends that they had to mock gay sex to make their friendship not seem too close, or inappropriately gay. I wrote that “an abnormally high – even for a vulgar, hard R comedy – percentage of the jokes in 21 Jump Street involve fear of gay sex. While Schmidt and Jenko state clearly that they don’t dislike gay people, theirs and the film’s extensive use of gay sexuality as something to mock and fear belies a homophobic subtext that isn’t very funny at all. The film is ultimately about male friendship, and it’s sad that the filmmakers felt the need to basically scream ‘no homo!’ throughout the movie to make such a theme palatable to their target audience.” The movie was a big enough hit to garner a sequel, and I was worried that 22 Jump Street, in which our heroes go undercover in college, would continue the perpetuation of my sexuality as one big joke.

I was particularly concerned when Jonah Hill – who is one of the film’s stars, producers, and writers – was caught on tape by TMZ calling a paparazzo a “faggot.” However, Hill’s swift and heartfelt apology was, as celebrity apologies go, rather amazing. He seems to understand how homophobic language works: “I said the most hurtful word I could think of at that moment and, you know, I didn’t mean this in the sense of the word … I didn’t mean it in a homophobic way. And I think that doesn’t matter, you know? How you mean things doesn’t matter. Words have weight and meaning and the word I chose was grotesque and no one deserves to say and hear words like that.” It was hard to reconcile this apology with 21 Jump Street’s gay panic, and it made me wonder whether the criticism of the film had gotten to him. Maybe 22 Jump Street would be different.

And it is. In a way. 22 Jump Street is, lucky for the gays, not a two-hour mockery of gay sex. At one point, Jenko even rages at one of the bad guys for calling him what Hill called the paparazzo: “In 2014, you can’t say the word ‘faggot’!” However, 22 Jump Street is unfortunately a two-hour mockery of gay love. There are long bits focused on how Jenko and Schmidt’s fights seem like those of lovers; one is about how Jenko’s desire to investigate another man is like asking to be able to see other people and another is done in the office of a therapist who thinks they’re lovers. This mockery is not particularly cruel, and the film, like its predecessor, is a celebration of male friendship, even if that friendship seems a bit gay. It’s fumbling toward an enlightened view of masculinity, but in 2014, “even if” is unnecessary and retrograde.

All of that said, 22 Jump Street is funny. In addition to a bunch of silly but laugh-worthy lines about sequels having bloated budgets and a dearth of ideas, both Hill and Tatum get to show off their ever-increasing movie stashine. Hill, who has now been nominated for two Oscars, bases much of his comedy on the humiliation of the needy nerd, and Schmidt is a nice encapsulation of a Hill character. (His parotic take on slam poetry is the best scene in the film.) When I saw 21 Jump Street, I thought casting Tatum as dumb jock Jenko perfect for his limited skills, but since then, I’ve come to realize he does dumb and pretty as Marilyn Monroe did – with great and underappreciated skill. Tatum is as good at being mentally clueless and physically flawless as Hill is at being schlubby and smart. They are perfect foils for each other. Maybe 23 Jump Street will jettison the homophobia and their comic pairing will become less cynical and daring. Or better, it will focus on how Schmidt and Jenko have been in love with each other the whole time. That would make all of this worthwhile.

I am not ashamed to say that I cry easily. I can dissolve into tears while listening to an NPR story about school reform, a play about climate change or while watching a bad TV show kill off a character that I only kind of liked. Yes, tears streamed down my face during that Glee episode about Finn’s death. I don’t get mad when I cry during a bad movie – at Michael Keaton’s Ghost for kids, Jack Frost, for example – because I know that the movie isn’t doing any work, but rather some image or line or situation is triggering an old emotion. However, I do appreciate it when the work justifies my emotional outburst, when screenwriters construct characters that deserve both my love and sadness and when directors resist the temptation of easy sentimentality and instead attempt profound pathos. The Fault in Our Stars, the hugely successful tearjerker starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, earned my tears, even if the filmmakers took a few shortcuts to get them.

Unless you’ve managed to ignore all of the advertising and hype surrounding the movie, you know that The Fault in Our Stars is a story about kids with cancer. The narrator is a teenage girl with wry wit and ponderous emotions named Hazel, who is played by the preternaturally gifted Shailene Woodley. At 13, Hazel had thyroid cancer that spread to her lungs. While the tumors are gone by the time the story begins, her lungs are still damaged, and she must cart around a tank that pushes oxygen through tubes into her nose. Her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) are concerned that she spends too much time alone and moping, so they encourage her to join a support group for teens with cancer. Though she is resistant, she goes and meets a tall, cocky, very sardonic boy who’d had much of his right leg amputated when he’d had “a touch of cancer” the year before. Augustus is played with young John Cusack charm and River Phoenix depth by Ansel Elgort, who played Woodley’s on screen brother in Divergent.

They start spending a great deal of time together, with Augustus courting a wary Hazel and them bonding over their love for a novel about a young girl with cancer written by a now reclusive man in Amsterdam. When Augustus finds out that Hazel used her Genie wish – a wish given to kids with cancer, like those from the Make a Wish Foundation – to go to Disneyworld when she was 13, he decides to use his wish to go to Amsterdam with Hazel and meet the reclusive writer and find out what happened to the characters in the book they love. When Hazel ends up in the hospital, she dumps Augustus because she doesn’t want to hurt him. Despite that and despite the difficulties in traveling with barely functioning lungs, Augustus, Hazel and Hazel’s protective, insanely understanding mother go to Amsterdam. The writer is not who they imagined, and as played by a typically unhinged Willem Dafoe, he is the catalyst for two major changes in Hazel and Augustus’ relationship.

I won’t reveal what happens in the next 30 minutes of the film, but suffice it to say that if you have a heart, you will cry. Director Josh Boone does overuse several tropes to egg on our emotions, including somewhat treacly music and dreamy montages of happy memories. But both Hazel and Augustus eschew the trappings of tragedy, with Hazel mocking cancer story genre conventions in her narration and Augustus making numerous jokes about cancer, often at his own expense. Hazel and Augustus are not raging against the dying of the light, as most characters in these sorts of stories do. Rather, they ponder the meaning of their lives and how they will be remembered while they stumble through frustration, illness, grief, fear and adolescence. The surprisingly philosophical and yet utterly believable dialogue comes from Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber adapting John Green’s novel, but it is ultimately the delivery of the lines with phenomenal empathy and naturalism by Woodley and Elgort that set off my tears.

A few times in these pages I’ve criticized the marketing departments of film studios for advertising films as the opposite of what they really are. There was 50/50, a movie about cancer that was sold as a comedy because Seth Rogan is in it and says a few funny things. August: Osage County was marketed as a dramatic comedy; it’s a tragedy that is occasionally funny and not always deliberately so. Those are relatively low budget bait-and-switches, however. I think the advertising campaign for the expensive Disney blockbuster Maleficent is the biggest lie in quite some time.

The billboards have all featured Angelina Jolie dressed as one of the most iconic screen villains of the last century – the evil fairy Maleficent from Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty – and the commercials and trailers feature her sneering, battling armored armies, swooping through the sky with creepy wings. And Jolie is perfectly cast as an evil demoness. Her beauty is otherworldly, and her most famous roles, from her Oscar win as the dangerously crazy Lisa in Girl, Interrupted to the assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, are fierce, violent antiheroes. Maleficent was sold to us as Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the villain, with Jolie vamping about and camping it up. It’s not. It’s a complete rewrite of the fairy tale, in which our villain becomes the hero.

If you have fond childhood memories of Sleeping Beauty, forget them. In Maleficent, the story is structured by two neighboring kingdoms, one human ruled by a nasty king, the other peaceful and communal full of happy, magical creatures. One day, in the latter, a teen boy is caught trying to steal a jewel from the fairy kingdom, and a winged and horned teen girl saves him from the anger of some tree creatures. The girl is Maleficent, and the boy is Stefan. They fall into a teen love before Stefan grows up to become an ambitious, vicious lapdog (crazy-eyed Sharlto Copley) to the king.

One day, the king inexplicably decides to invade the fairy kingdom. Maleficent is now an adult and the protector of the realm. She and the tree warriors handily beat back the human army.

The king says that anyone who defeats her will be made his successor, so Stefan rekindles his romance with Maleficent as a trick. He drugs her and cuts off her wings and is made king.

She’s not pleased and in her anger becomes, for about 20 minutes, the villain we were promised. She forcefully becomes queen of the other fairies and then, per Sleeping Beauty, curses Stefan’s baby daughter Aurora (an uncharacteristically vapid Elle Fanning): she will be pricked by a spindle on her 16th birthday and fall into a sleep that she can only be woken from by the kiss of true love. Stefan has three good fairies hide Aurora in the forest, but Maleficent and her werecrow henchman Diaval (Sam Riley) find them immediately.

And here’s where it all goes sideways. Spoiler! While spying on Aurora, Maleficent becomes enamored with the beautiful, sweet girl. She tries and fails to remove her own curse, and the final third of the film is a reformed Maleficent trying to save Aurora while battling the vengeful forces of Stefan. The plot hole is gaping here. If Maleficent just told Stefan she was trying to save his daughter from the curse, the whole final confrontation would have been moot.

I expected a great deal more from screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who also wrote the impeccable Beauty & the Beast and the problematically racist but perfectly structured Lion King. Jolie only has a few snarky lines, and nothing really for even a low-rent drag queen to work with.

I appreciate the feminist reconstruction of the story, making the central bond about mothering and sisterhood and not about a mythically perfect prince. But this was done much better in Brave and Frozen, and not at the expense of drama. Director Robert Stromberg, who won Oscars for the production design of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, does a passable job with the action and a brilliant job with the visuals, even if the fairy kingdom does look a little too much like a magical Pandora.

]]>http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/06/05/maleficent-a-complete-rewrite-of-the-fairy-tale/feed/0Movie review: X-Men: Days of Future Past — undoubtedly the best of the franchisehttp://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/29/movie-review-x-men-days-of-future-past-undoubtedly-the-best-of-the-franchise/
http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/29/movie-review-x-men-days-of-future-past-undoubtedly-the-best-of-the-franchise/#commentsThu, 29 May 2014 23:23:58 +0000LGBT Weeklyhttp://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/29/movie-review-x-men-days-of-future-past-undoubtedly-the-best-of-the-franchise/

Hugh Jackman in X-Men: Days of Future Past

The X-Men storyline called Days of Future Past appeared in issues 141 and 142 of The Uncanny X-Men in January and February, 1980. I first read it in mid-1980s when I was 12 or so and had just discovered the comic about outcast mutant superheroes. The story has haunted me ever since. It is set in a horrifying dystopian future of 2013, when giant robots called the Sentinels have started a world war after slaughtering or enslaving all the mutants they can find. Among the few remaining are a handful of aging X-Men and their progeny. Kitty Pryde, who in 1980 was the newest and youngest of the X-Men at 13, is one of the survivors and she and Rachel Summers, the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey, have a daring plan to fix the world. They are going to send Kitty’s consciousness back to her 1980 body and convince the other X-Men to stop the assassination of anti-mutant demagogue Sen. Robert Kelly, whose death at the hands of shape-shifting Mystique and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants justifies the anti-mutant hysteria and leads to the building of the Sentinels. Days of Future Past, as created by writer Chis Claremont and artist John Byrne, inarguably the greatest X-Men storytellers, was extraordinarily dark and full of death and existential dread, which was almost unheard of in mainstream comics at the time.

Days of Future Past is considered one of the most influential narratives in not just comics but science fiction in general, and it was adapted twice for animated X-Men television shows in the 1990s, and it is the basis for Bryan Singer’s latest X-Men movie, his third and the franchise’s seventh since 2000. While Days of Future Past is as perfect a story as any in comics history, Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg drastically changed it for their film, partly because Singer had decided (and was inexplicably allowed) to recreate and remythologize the X-Men for the first film, X-Men, back in 2000. In the latest film, it is franchise star Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who is sent back, and this time it is to 1973, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), by herself, is going to kill Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of the Sentinels.

Wolverine is sent by Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who somehow has developed the super-psychic powers needed for the time shift. He is tasked with convincing a young and depressed version of Professor X (James McAvoy), the Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and a superfast juvenile delinquent named Peter (better known as Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters) to break young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) out of prison and stop Mystique, who at a younger age was the Professor’s adopted sister and Magneto’s lover. Meanwhile, in the future, the surviving X-Men, including Storm (Halle Berry), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Bishop (Omar Sy), must battle the Sentinels to protect Kitty and Wolverine’s entranced bodies.

If it sounds a bit overstuffed with superheroes, it certainly is, but Singer and Kinberg manage it well by making sure that only the drama in 1973 has any emotional heft, and giving the future’s characters barely any lines. (Oscar-winner Berry, for instance, is fifth billed and speaks maybe four times. Anna Paquin, another Oscar-winner, is seventh billed and doesn’t even speak during her one-second appearance, as her one real scene was cut from the film. No wonder the movie cost $200 million to make.) McAvoy’s Professor X, who must find a way to escape wallowing in self-pity to save the world and mutankind, is the only character with a believable arc, since Fassbender’s Magneto changes his mind for unwritten and perplexing reasons, Mystique’s motivation never wavers and Wolverine is always the same: kick ass, save the world, smoke a cigar, have mournful thoughts about Jean Grey.

Despite the thinness of the characters and the continued bastardization of the X-Men’s best stories, X-Men: Days of Future Past is still a pretty great action film, and undoubtedly the best of the franchise. Singer and Kinberg keep the adrenalin pumping from the first scene and only let up for scenes of exposition that are probably only too short for film critics.

The massive superhero battles are choreographed well, and the production design, of both the 1970s and the dystopia, is impeccable. I have a hard time cheering for Singer, who is embroiled in a sexual assault lawsuit that few in gay Hollywood find remotely surprising, but X-Men: Days of Future Past is a triumph for him; his best film since his classic The Usual Suspects.

When Larry Kramer premiered his play The Normal Heart off-Broadway in 1985, his agonizing, angry autobiographical story about the AIDS epidemic in New York City and the few activists desperately trying to help their lovers and friends, hit the city like an emotional meteor. While a very few theater critics were able to see through the anger and desperation and criticize the play for its occasional polemical two-dimensionality, most people who saw it experienced it like Kramer’s alter ego in the play Ned Weeks did AIDS: enraged and distraught. Kramer, who helped found both the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and ACT-UP, is arguably the least subtle of modern American civil rights heroes; he makes Malcolm X seem like a cranky assistant principal. But of those heroes, only Martin Luther King Jr. was as great a writer. Whatever dramaturgical problems the play had, Kramer wrote speeches for his characters that were powerfully eloquent enough to mobilize audiences to turn on the city that had long sheltered but had ultimately failed gay men. (It’s doubtful that New York’s closeted Mayor Ed Koch could have prevented AIDS from becoming an epidemic, but it’s inarguable that his selfish, terrified inaction made it worse for New Yorkers infected with HIV.)

You’d think with a figure like Larry Kramer and a play so powerful and celebrated and a topic so immediate and dire, The Normal Heart would have been filmed quickly. But two things intervened: Kramer’s irascibility scared the bejesus out of closeted Hollywood, and Barbra Streisand, who held the rights to the film for more than a decade, thought the cinematic narcissism called The Mirror Has Two Faces was more important for her to make. It wasn’t until a celebrated 2011 Broadway revival of the play that the combined forces of HBO and Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) finally managed to begin filming.

Their stunningly good production of The Normal Heart is arriving more the 29 years after the play’s premiere. In that time GMHC became an entrenched bureaucracy and ACT-UP rose and fell. Protease inhibitors made HIV a manageable illness like diabetes in wealthy countries and those countries have helped make it so for millions in poor countries. Gay marriage is legal in 19 states and it is a Supreme Court decision away from being the law of the land. Honestly, we don’t need The Normal Heart the same way we did in 1985. While the play was written as contemporary political theater, it can’t be that now. Now, it is just history. This would seem to ensure that the film would be less than what the play was, but the opposite is what has happened. Kramer’s adaptation of his own play not only makes it work better for the expansive power of film, but it also fixes the particularly dated features of the play, tempering the anachronistic prevention arguments, deepening once flat characters and expanding the story from its local specifics into more universality. The Normal Heart is no longer dated; it’s timeless.

Kramer’s alter ego is Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a neurotic gay writer unlucky in love and critical of gay men’s shallow promiscuity (and thus disliked by many of them). It is 1981, and his friends start getting sick and then dying, and based on the expertise of a cranky, wheelchair bound doctor (Julia Roberts), he helps organize a group of gay men to do something. In the play, the organization is unnamed, but in the film, as in reality, this organization is GMHC, now one of the country’s largest AIDS service organizations. While attempting to get The New York Times to write more about the disease, he meets Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), a beautiful fashion writer, and they quickly fall in love. Meanwhile, Ned and his GMHC partners worry and grieve about their lovers and fight about tactics and personalities, with Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch) representing the waspy conservative accommodation-minded opposite of Ned’s confrontational Jew and Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons) as their sweet, smart middleman. The stakes are powerfully raised when Felix reveals to Ned that he has a Kaposi sarcoma lesion growing on his foot. Between Felix’s illness, Bruce’s opposition, and the disapproval of Ned’s brother Ben (Alfred Molina), Ned is in a constant state of agony – and righteousness. The end of the story is pre-ordained by history and circumstance, and you will cry.

Kramer’s screenplay reorders scenes, deletes several expository AIDS 101 monologues, gives Roberts one extra minute to earn more sympathy and greatly expands Tommy’s character. Based on Roger McFarlane, Kramer’s close friend and the first executive director of GMHC who went on to run multiple other AIDS organizations, Tommy was a small but key character in the play. In the film, he comes to represent the pragmatic, responsible, moral good that came from the idealistic and fraught early fighting between Ned and Bruce. Parsons, who has won three Emmys for The Big Bang Theory and is possibly the great comic actor of his generation, shows that he is as versatile and powerful as the film’s star Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo, to his credit, has never been as great on screen, despite brilliant performances in You Can Count on Me and The Kids Are All Right, and he is funny, heartbreaking, annoying and very sexy. Performing a character created to be cried over, Bomer is obvious, but good. Roberts’ casting was maligned by some purists, but her cold, angry performance is flawless.

The biggest surprise for viewers not familiar with New York theater is Joe Mantello, best known now for his direction of, among other major Broadway shows, Wicked. As Mickey Marcus, one of Ned’s best friends, Mantello erupts in the third act of the film with the greatest of Kramer’s speeches, a barnburner of rage and agony. Like Parsons and Bomer, Mantello is an out gay man, and they join several other famous out actors – including Stephen Spinella, Denis O’Hare and BD Wong – in a largely out gay cast. That would have been impossible in a film shot during the 1980s.

Mark Ruffalo in The Normal Heart

While Kramer and the cast are responsible for much of the film’s success, I have to give director Ryan Murphy his due. I think he’s the most overrated producer and writer in television. Whatever Glee’s charms, it’s wildly inconsistent and occasionally unwatchable, and American Horror Story is sadistic misogyny as low-brow art. I was terrified of what he would do to such an important work like The Normal Heart. But the film, despite being a little long and edited occasionally too bluntly, is beautifully directed, with scenes tautly staged and occasionally gorgeously shot. And when everyone in a cast delivers such consistently great performances, it can’t be simply their natural talent. Murphy directed them, and the film, to greatness.

As I was walking out of Locke, a man behind me told his wife, “That’s my worst nightmare.” I was thinking of other clichés, too: for Ivan Locke, the events in the film are a shitshow, a tsunami, his Waterloo, a perfect storm. Most American audiences know Tom Hardy, who plays Locke, for sci-fi action roles: the perfectly suited, smoldering Eames in Inception and the masked nihilist Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. They might expect Locke to be suffering in a spaceship battle or an espionage caper gone wrong. Ivan Locke, however, is not worried about the physical world ending, but rather about the destruction his personal, familial, middle class world. And we watch him worry about it for 90 minutes while he drives to London, the only physical action coming from him answering the phone, blowing his nose, and shuffling papers. Ivan Locke is as opposite from his Hardy’s most famous roles as possible, but it is his most powerful and moving performance.

The film opens with a wide pan of a construction site, a giant hole in the ground that will be the base of a seemingly very large building. It’s evening and the workers are leaving for home, and we see one unlock a BMW, change out of dirty boots, and climb into the driver’s seat. He connects his phone to the Bluetooth and dials someone listed as “Bastard,” and he leaves an urgent message for a man named Gareth (Ben Daniels) with one word: “concrete.” Then he dials Donal (Andrew Scott); Ivan tells him that he will not be at work the next morning. Donal freaks out because it is the next morning when Ivan is supposed to supervise pouring the concrete foundation of the building, and it is going to involve the largest pour of concrete for a non-military site in the history of Europe. (You will learn a great deal about concrete while watching Locke.)

Next, Ivan calls home. His wife is at the store but he tells his oldest son that he won’t be home to watch the game. Then Ivan dials Bethen (Olivia Colman) and tells her that he got her message and that he’s on his way to London. Bethen, as it turns out, is a woman Ivan had sex with once, and she is now having his baby, two months early. And when Katrina, Ivan’s wife, calls, he finally tells her that he slept with another woman who is giving birth. It does not go well. Many of Ivan’s phone calls do not go well that night.

As all of the action takes place inside a car, with Hardy the only person visible and the other characters’ only heard, that writer-director Stephen Knight manages to make Locke riveting is near miraculous. The film is paced almost like a thriller, but the stakes in a thriller are usually much higher. Ivan’s predicament is not life and death, but rather his ability to be a good man. Before this night, no one had ever doubted him. He was an impeccable person. But he made a terrible mistake in a moment of weakness, and he is trying to live up to his own standards, to do the right thing, right by Katrina, by Gareth and Donal, and by Bethen. His father had not done the right thing by Ivan, and Ivan refuses to be his father. That it is impossible for all of this to be fixed is clear very early in the film, and Ivan knows it. But he still tries.

Though his situation is desperate, Ivan’s nobility is constant. That Hardy can balance these two is remarkable. A lesser actor would use this kind of role to be explosive, to wail at the world or to chew scenery. Hardy’s Ivan is cold, but this is made clear to be a defense against the emotional chaos of Ivan’s childhood. But it wasn’t a defense enough against the night his life falls apart, becoming, yes, a nightmare.

MOVIE REVIEW

Locke

Written and directed by Stephen Knight

Starring Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman and Ruth Wilson

Rated R

At Landmark Hillcrest and ArcLight La Jolla

]]>http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/15/movie-review-locke-tom-hardys-perfect-storm/feed/0Webb sticks close to the comic book in ‘Spider-Man 2′http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/08/webb-sticks-close-to-the-comic-book-in-spider-man-2/
http://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/08/webb-sticks-close-to-the-comic-book-in-spider-man-2/#commentsThu, 08 May 2014 15:26:16 +0000LGBT Weeklyhttp://lgbtweekly.com/2014/05/08/webb-sticks-close-to-the-comic-book-in-spider-man-2/

Jamie Foxx and Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

My biggest peeve with many comic book movies is how much they divert from their source materials. However, Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies, whatever liberties taken with plot points, did not change the essence of Peter Parker and his alter ego: he was a teenage orphan who was bitten by a radioactive spider and turned into an angsty, wise-cracking do-gooder superhero who could stick to walls, lift a hell of a lot of weight and swing on webs shot from his wrists. He was torn by his commitment to the great responsibility that came with his great power and his love for both his Aunt May and the woman he loved, Mary Jane Watson.

When Marc Webb rebooted the franchise two years ago, he kept most of these key elements, this time casting the wonderful Andrew Garfield as Peter, but instead of having a new Mary Jane, he cast the even more wonderful Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, Peter’s girlfriend from the 1960s and 1970s comic book. While this decision definitely makes the reboot more similar to the comic book, Webb has yet to achieve either the emotional power or the adrenalin rush of Raimi’s excellent first two films. (Raimi’s third was awful.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 starts shortly after the events in the previous film. Spider-Man is a superhero-about-town, trying to balance his heroics with his relationships with Gwen and Aunt May (Sally Field). Peter promised Gwen’s dying father that he would stay away from Gwen to protect her from his dangerous life, and he breaks up with her for that reason. Of course, that doesn’t last long. Meanwhile, Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) inherits his father’s massive biotech company, which employs both Gwen and Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), an electrical engineer with something like Asperger’s Syndrome.

Harry’s dying father Norman tells Harry that the disease killing him will also kill his son. Harry is determined to find a cure and discovers that old experiments conducted by Peter’s deceased father (Campbell Scott) created the spiders that gave Peter his powers and may also save Harry. Around the same time, Max gets shot with a zillion bolts of electricity and falls into a tank of electric eels and is turned into Electro, a mentally unstable human lightning bolt. Somehow all of this swirls together into a typically overstuffed – though mostly coherent, in this case – comic book movie plot.

While Foxx and DeHaan munch on a good amount of CGI scenery being crazy and dastardly, the scenes between Garfield and Stone and Field are lovely. Garfield is a more relaxed and much funnier Peter than Toby Maguire was in Raimi’s films, and his dialogue with Stone is so sweet, wry and believable that I wished Webb had directed them in a romantic comedy instead of a superhero film. Garfield’s scenes with Field are similarly affecting. Unfortunately, half of the film is focused on clichéd superhero action that might as well have been animated.

Spoiler alert: halfway through The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I remembered the whole point of Gwen Stacy – she is there to die. Most Spider-Man fans probably only think of Peter Parker being with Mary Jane Watson, but for the first decade of his character’s existence, he is with Gwen, a character and a relationship then beloved to fans.

In 1973, just as in this latest film, she is killed during a battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. The reverberations of Gwen’s death was expansive in the Marvel Universe, and to comic books in general, as it marked the end of the optimistic innocence of superheroes and a turn to darker stories. It is clear from the last ten minutes of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, her death has profoundly changed Webb’s version of Peter Parker and, assumedly, this change will be central to the plot of the next movie. Whether this will lead Webb to create a more interesting and compelling film is debatable.

There are a large number of people who will go to see Under the Skin simply because they heard that there was a great deal of nudity in it. Of particular importance, Scarlett Johansson, the famous and curvaceous blonde actress many men (and women) fantasize about, is particularly naked, the first time she has gone full frontal on film. This is of note, I guess, because, especially in the United State, nudity is taboo and actresses who are willing to be nude on film are often looked down upon (while actors who do it are considered brave). Johansson did not go nude for a blockbuster Hollywood film, but, rather, for art, which should get her a pass from our nation of prudes. I have a feeling that the pervs that go to see Under the Skin won’t give it a pass, because they will likely be mystified – unless the pervs enjoy difficult, ponderous art films. I’m not a perv, but I do love that type of film, and director Jonathan Glazer has made an indelible, hypnotic masterpiece of an art film with Under the Skin.

The film begins with a clear signal that the viewer is not going to be coddled as they are with populist Hollywood movies. After spare white credits, the screen in black for a long moment as a low drone sounds. Finally a white dot appears, then a bright star, then swirling colors and abstract images while the soundtrack crackles and beeps and Scarlett Johansson’s voice is heard making various phonetic sounds: e, ah, oh, and so on. This goes on for a while, and it’s as beautiful as it is perplexing. Finally, we see the dark (Scottish, as it turns out) countryside and a speeding motorcycle turning through a curvy road. The cyclist stops, run downs an embankment, and then returns, a dead woman flung over his shoulder. He puts the body in the back of a parked white van and zooms away. Suddenly, we see a vast space of white light; a naked woman (Johansson) pulls the clothes off of the dead woman and dresses herself in them.

Next, we watch her driving the van around Edinburgh, stalking men. After she finds a man who is alone, has no one expecting him and no family, she seduces him. Each time, she drives him to an abandoned building, which she enters first. As he follows her, they are both suddenly in a space as black as the clothes-change space was white. She undresses, beckoning to the man, and he walks toward her, removing his clothes, piece by a piece. When he is completely naked (and often erect), the blackness envelops him until he is gone. She puts her clothes back on and looks for another man.

We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is. We are never told why she is killing these men, how she is doing it, who the helpful motorcyclist is, or why she expresses no emotion as the men (or any others) die. However, something does happen to her after she picks up a disfigured man with plans to send him, like the others, to the black goo. (That man is played by Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis, which causes non-cancerous tumors to grow on his face.) She seems to develop introspection, and this leads her deep into the Scottish countryside, the motorcyclist in pursuit.

If all of this sounds rather odd, it is. That the film offers no explanation as to the motivation or origin of Johannson’s character or her motorcyclist pal and barely provides signals of her transformation in the third act. The audience needs to do a lot of work to piece things together, and this is often the hallmark of what we call “art films.” Sometimes, I think, this abstraction becomes pretentious, but other times, like in Under the Skin, the abstraction is what makes the art. I don’t think too many people would argue that any semi-skilled actress could have done Johansson’s part, but Johansson’s fame was needed to bring in audiences. Once there, they can witness Glazer’s sublime use of the Scottish landscapes, Mica Levi’s truly haunting score and our own expectations of science fiction to create one of the most original major films in some time.

The first two minutes of Dom Hemingway is perhaps the most thrilling film scene I’ve seen in several months. As the titular character, Jude Law – beefed up, with mutton chops and his natural receding hairline – stands naked and sweaty, only his head and torso visible for those two minutes while he gives a fierce, bombastic, shockingly poetic monologue about the wondrous nature of his cock. Two minutes is not a very long time in our real world, but on film, it can seem like an eternity, but not here. Law becomes more ecstatic as he comes closer to orgasm; this ode to his cock explodes as a fellow prison inmate is giving him a blowjob. It’s fabulous (if filthy) writing and a fabulous performance, and when Law is peeling the paint off the walls with his intense recital of writer-director Richard Shepard’s monologues, the film is mesmerizing. But the plot does not live up to the promise of the many great individual scenes.

Dom is a British career criminal who is released from prison shortly after his cock talk. He had refused to testify against his boss, so instead of a plea-bargained three years, he served 12. During that time, his wife left him for another man and then died of cancer. His daughter grew up and has erased him from her life. Despite the joy of his release, he is very, very angry, and he hopes this disaster will be tempered by finally receiving not just payment for the safe cracking that got him sent to jail but also a deserved gift for his time and troubles. So, after beating his ex-wife’s new husband to a pulp and then drinking and whoring for three days, he and his best friend – the effete, constantly eyebrow-raised Dickie (Richard E. Grant, most recently of Girls) – take the train to the south of France to meet Dom’s former boss, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir, Oscar nominated for A Better Life).

The visit both goes much worse and much better and then much worse than anyone could have expected. Afterwards, Dom needs the help of his daughter Evelyn (Emilia Clarke, the Khalisi in Game of Thrones), who has married and had a child with a Senegalese man named Hugh (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, from the British sci-fi show Misfits). She is not impressed with her father, who appears drunk and bloody on her doorstep.

As you can see, the plot is very complex, and that usually can work in a novel, but rarely on screen. (I was actually surprised that Shepard didn’t adapt Dom Hemingway from a book.) In a film, the constant turns and misdirections make for a convoluted story. It’s also a bit tonally confusing. The bloody, somewhat slapstick crime story feels like it came from a Guy Ritchie film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, while the family drama about regret and redemption seem to have been culled from something like Love Actually. Merged together, the film doesn’t jell. That said, Shepard writes coke and alcohol-fueled monologues as well as he directs tense and hilarious testosterone-soaked scenes. Even if he doesn’t pull it all together as well as, say, Quentin Tarentino and Danny Boyle can with similar material, Dom Hemingway is a lot of fun.

Most of this, of course, is because Jude Law gives his best performance in more than ten years and the funniest of his career. He put on thirty pounds (drinking ten cokes a day), and it looks very, very good on his familiar lither frame. Luckily for us, he’s naked for a couple of rather long scenes. But it’s his spitting, throbbing, screaming explosion of a performance that really matters and makes Dom Hemingway well worth watching.

Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

For a good number of people, I could convince them to see a movie with a review one sentence long: “Tilda Swinton plays a vampire.”

Though she’s been starring in films for nearly three decades – her first role was in Derek Jarman’s queer masterpiece Caravaggio in 1986 – it has only been since she was perfectly cast as the White Witch in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 2005 and then won an Oscar two years later for Michael Clayton that she became truly famous. She is strikingly tall, archly beautiful and she has an acting talent as nuanced and mannered at Cate Blanchett’s. But she has a taste for much weirder roles, as the title character in Sally Potter’s transgender classic Orlando, the 83-year-old Madame D. in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or as both David Bowie’s wife and as David Bowie himself in David Bowie’s video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).”

And then there was her art project in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; she slept in a glass box as museumgoers watched. She has developed such a cult following as an icon of artful oddness that the utterings of the parody Twitter account @NotTildaSwinton seem believable: “A mission for you. Go outside, hold an animal to your breast. That is real warmth, not the glow of your screen. I typed this on a rabbit.”

In Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Swinton plays Eve, an achingly-sweet, centuries-old aesthete who happens to be a vampire. Her similarly afflicted husband Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston (who is Loki in the Thor films and The Avengers), is a glum musical genius who hides from the world, composing from afar, talking to no one but a clueless hired hand (Anton Yelchin) and his wife, but to her only over Skype. She lives in Tangiers, along with her friend Kit Marlowe (yes, that one, played by John Hurt), and Adam lives in a particularly dilapidated section of Detroit. She decides to come to him after he expresses more suicidal depressive thoughts about the weight of the world. During her visit, as they discuss history and art and their love, Eve’s crass and silly sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives, and she creates situations that force this short story in the lives of Adam and Eve to climax in hunger and, of course, blood.

Unlike most vampire films, which tend to have outrageously high stakes involving the end of the world or at least the ends of the main characters, Only Lovers Left Alive is a slow, thoughtful, often hilarious character study. Jim Jarmusch has been making such films since the early 1980s, and he has been able to bring in talents similarly idiosyncratic to Swinton’s, with Tom Waits in Down by Law, Johnny Depp in Dead Man, and Bill Murray in Broken Flowers. Hiddleston is wonderful in the movie, bitterly funny and in awe of his wife, but Swinton is the loving, beating, glorious heart of the film. She is heroically generous, kind and wise. And as someone who once dreamt of being an aesthete himself, I fell in love with her Eve as she packed dozens of aging, yellowing books for her trip to Detroit.

Detroit itself is an uncredited member of the cast. Adam has sequestered himself in a crumbling mansion in a barely lit part of America’s most embarrassing failure, and he takes Eve for long drives through the deserted streets, guiding the tour with achingly sad stories about the once epically beautiful buildings that are now car parks and ruins. It is a symbol for Adam’s sadness about the world and what the zombies – his terms for humans – have done to it. Or, Adam and Eve’s relationship and Eve’s desire to keep living and loving forever is a metaphor for the hope for Detroit’s (America’s?) future. Or it’s both. Jarmusch, who grew up in the similarly sad Akron, has made a movie about the undead that is actually about living.

I kept wondering if James Franco and Travis Mathews’ odd faux documentary Interior. Leather Bar. would ever make it to San Diego, and that’s moot since it’s now available on demand at Vimeo.com. The idea for the film is brilliantly titillating. Rumor has it that 40 minutes of graphic sex in a gay leather bar were shot and cut for the infamous 1980 Al Pacino thriller Cruising, and Franco and Mathews (the writer and director of art-porn sensation I Want Your Love) have decided to recreate those scenes and make a documentary about that re-creation. We watch as they discuss the idea with Val Lauren, who they cast as the Al Pacino role, and we watch as the extras are given motivation and direction. We watch Lauren, who is almost aggressively heterosexual, fret about what this film will do for his fledgling career, and we watch as everyone says over and over again that they’re only on set because of how much they love and respect Franco. And then we watch as they all watch the extras have sex – very graphic sex – for scenes that would be totally strange non sequiturs in Williams Friedkin’s gritty, somewhat unnerving original film.

Val Lauren and Christian Patrick in Interior. Leather Bar

When I saw the movie a few months ago in Los Angeles, I was delighted by it because it was, in the end, a cruel bait-and-switch. I laughed at the irritation of the audience because they were expecting something else. They were expecting what the film purports to be, a documentary about the making of something fascinating and lost to the homophobia of the late 1970s. (Spoiler alert!) And, honestly, I wish they had made that movie, because it would have been fascinating and much more entertaining. And they would have at least made an attempt to ask Friedkin, who is still alive and making movies, what actually is true about the rumors. But Franco and Mathews instead made a fictional, narrative film about making such a documentary. Everything was scripted (or at least ad-libbed with fictional goals in mind) and, eventually, it rings rather false.

For some reason, the audience is meant to sympathize with Lauren and his plight, to feel for his clear discomfort with gay sex and to learn, along with him, about where that discomfort comes from and how it hurts gay men. I felt as if Franco and Mathews had a conversation about queer theory and film psychology while very high and came up with this weird experiment in audience expectations. The problem with that is I cannot imagine that any more than a tiny fraction of the audience for Interior. Leather Bar. will be straight men, who are the only people I can imagine who could identify with Lauren’s portrayal of a more homophobic version of himself.

Among the United Kingdom’s greatest exports – including Downton Abbey, Cadbury Eggs and the Magna Carta – is the underdog feel-good comedy. Where would world culture be without The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, Little Voice and Bend it Like Beckham? In a terrible place, I reckon. (This is as long as you don’t think about the actual politics of the films, which are very American, in that the films actually reify class structures by showing that only truly exceptional people and circumstances justify class-crossing.) Many of these films usually come to the United States with a Weinstein imprimatur and, despite being one of the more enjoyable of this genre in recent years this month’s Cuban Fury is coming in without such a distributor. Without a wide release, it may not last long. See this wonderful movie while you can.

Nick Frost plays Bruce, a chunky Brit with a job in middle management and no one who loves him but his bartender sister Sam (Olivia Colman). As a teen, he had been something else: a confident champion salsa dancer. On his way to a major dance championship, he was beaten by homophobic bullies and never danced again, much to the chagrin of his touch-talking coach, Ron (delightfully type-cast Ian McShane). Everything changes when a new boss arrives. Julia (Rashida Jones) is both dorky and stunning, and immediately, both Bruce and his frenemy Drew (Chris O’Dowd) set their skeevy eyes on Julia. Even though Drew is clearly a cad, he has the confidence Bruce lacks.

When Bruce discovers that Julia loves salsa, some sort of fire lights inside him and he decides to make a change. He actually has a chance, if he can get his chunky body into those tight shoes and move across the dance floor like he had twenty years before. He finds his hard-drinking old coach and starts taking his dance lessons, where he meets the outrageous Bejan (Kayvan Novak), who is my favorite stereotypically gay sidekick of 2014. One thing leads to another, and along the way, there’s a purloined letter, some Three’s Company slapstick and an epic dance battle between Bruce and Drew. These movies all end the same way, which is comforting.

Cuban Fury was Nick Frost’s idea and written by Jon Brown, whose screenplay is structurally clichéd but full of hilariously ribald lines, the dirtiest coming from Drew and the most queer from Bejan. Directed by James Griffiths, who has helmed many episodes of Episodes, one of the best comedies on American television, the script crackles, not partly because the lines are delivered by actors less cast for their fame than for their skills.

I hope the film will be a starmaker for the everyman Frost, a British comedy mainstay who is little known to American audiences other than as the guy who isn’t Simon Pegg in Edgar Wright movies like Shaun of the Dead and This is the End. Chris O’Dowd, who played the Scottish cop in Bridesmaids, doesn’t need the publicity, but in Cuban Fury, he shows just how slimy his comedy can be.

Rashida Jones, who has just left Parks and Recreation, does the humbly daffy dream girl thing very well, and I assume (and hope) she is being positioned as a leading lady in romantic comedies. I believe she can do a great deal more than that, though she does that kind of acting better than most of the women getting paid $15 million a film for it.